


Travel Companions

by Nevcolleil



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2005-01-02
Updated: 2012-01-16
Packaged: 2017-10-29 15:58:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/321629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione Granger is investigating a phenomenon nobody can explain with a man she never could stand when they were children. And as if all of that weren't difficult enough, there are forces literally <i>raising Hell</i> as she does it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Draco Malfoy had never much liked the Americas, the States in particular. They were much too modern and Muggle for his tastes. No respected pureblooded family ever went there unless they were on vacation or hiding from someone, and Draco was very proud of his respectable, pureblooded roots. He had no reason to hide from anyone (if you didn't take into account that whole, used-to-be-a-Death-Eater-turned-spy problem). Draco also never vacationed anywhere that didn't involve lavish guest accommodations, little need to venture outdoors, and scantily clad females speaking languages he'd never even heard of. And by the time he was twenty-two, Draco had only visited the US twice.

Both trips had been a disaster.

The first had been taken when Draco was only a child. His powers had just started to manifest themselves and were quite beyond his control (or so he liked to claim whenever his mother referred to The Incident that had occurred during their ill-fated American holiday). The second trip had been on business, and Draco had had to suffer the company of his fellow Auror, Ronald Weasley.

"Enough said," Draco concluded, looking suspiciously close to beginning a pout.

Hermione Granger repressed a shudder. She had seen a lot of terrible and dangerous things in her life...what, with The War and all. But The Malfoy Pout had to be the worst of all. There was just nothing like it - and nothing more irritating, seeing as the wizard sprawled across the bench in front of her had so little to pout about. He was young, and rich, and unsettlingly good-looking. He was a highly-decorated war hero (surprise, surprise), and famous for the work he'd done for the Ministry, post-war. Only one of Draco's contemporaries had garnered as much celebrity as he during battle, and that was The Boy Who'd Killed Voldemort himself.

Draco had fared rather well, considering the fact that he'd once fought for the other side. And had nearly become The Boy Who'd Killed the Boy Who Would Have Killed Voldemort. Twice.

But what's more - he never pouted about that. Oh, no. It was always something silly and mundane. Or something that had something to do with Ron. Or Muggles. Or Ron and Muggles...

"Well, you know what they say," Hermione muttered, not even looking up from the day's addition of The Daily Prophet. "Third time's a charm." 'Maybe the insufferable git will anger some American wildlife and get himself bit. Or worse.'

Hermione wasn't sure what bothered her more. The fact that Malfoy so routinely pushed her to the point of wishing pain on a coworker. Or the fact that she only ever half meant it when she did. The thought that Malfoy - Draco Malfoy - could be growing on her, even endearing himself to her, was not one that Hermione happily entertained. Nor was it one Ron was likely to approve of. It had taken him long enough to accept the fact that Harry, their Harry, had actually begun to consider Draco a friend. If Hermione learned to tolerate him, as well, Ron's world would just crumble like so much stale pumpkin pastry.

Come to think of it, Ron rather had a tendency to pout when discussing the mission he and Draco had had to conduct in America together, as well. And he'd probably rather splinch himself than admit that he and the other man had even that much in common.

"There's nothing charming about California," Malfoy whined, pulling Hermione out of her meandering thoughts on their fellow Auror. Hermione rolled her eyes. "It's hot. And sandy. And sunny." He spoke as if the word itself were vile, and Hermione's sympathy for him existed not at all. "I can't believe we're on our way to a place that actually uses sunny as a part of it's name," Malfoy continued. "Sunnydale. Bloody hell. I bet you there's a Girl Scout selling cookies on every corner, and one of those tacky "Welcome" mats on every doorstep."

Hermione sighed and finally put down her paper. "Only you would consider sunshine and good will negative travel experiences," she muttered. "And I doubt we'll find many Girl Scouts on the Hellmouth, Malfoy. That is why we're going there, after all. The place is overrun by demons and vampires."

Hermione picked her paper back up and hid a smile behind it.

"You'll fit right in," she mumbled under her breath.

"Hey!"

Hermione's smile became a grin.

 

~][~

 

It wasn't that Malfoy whined often, really. Or pouted with any regularity. It was just that he got such notice when he did. And for a man who'd been spoiled past rotten as a boy (albeit at a price, admittedly) when Draco slipped into self-pity mode, the term "pity party" became an all-out, no-holds-barred "pity extravaganza".

Twenty minutes into their flight out of the UK, Hermione was desperately trying to get comfortable in her cramped airplane seat. She'd asked the flight attendants repeatedly for a pillow, to no avail. Draco had asked once and had been given a pillow, two blankets, and all the flight-attendant-generated sympathy and attention Hermione could stand.   
The Malfoy Pout was indeed a disturbing and dangerous thing to behold in action.

"Oh, cut it out, Malfoy!" Hermione nearly screeched by the time Draco had the stewardesses making routine checks to see that his pillows (yes, in the plural, despite the fact that Hermione had yet to receive even one) were properly fluffed.

Draco merely raised a brow while the nearby flight attendant was present, his face its usual mask of cool indifference and bemused superiority. Then he flashed the perky blonde serving him a drink a set of puppy-dog-eyes Hermione would never have imagined him capable of producing. (Draco's aristocratic features and steel-gray eyes were not at all conducive to affecting the puppy-dog look.) The blonde threw Hermione a harsh glare and bounced away, whereupon Draco favored his frustrated companion with a large, and what Hermione would call evil, grin.

Hermione would call it evil. Except that she'd seen Draco do evil. I-want-to-rid-the-world-of-your-kind, it's-Saturday-let's-go-pillage-and-plunder evil. This was more of the I'm-driving-you-mad-aren't-I-? variety of Malfoy no-good-ness. Hermione had to concentrate really hard not to smack him.

"What's the matter, Granger? We're not getting jealous, are we?”

"You are going to drive me mad, Malfoy. I swear that you will if you don't stop messing about with the flight attendants. Can't you just sit still and quiet for one hour?"

The Malfoy Pout threatened to make a sudden reappearance before being shot down by Granger's Deadly Glare.

Draco often wondered how something so small - and rather pretty, actually, when being brutally honest with himself - could produce a look of such frightening displeasure. He was very nearly impressed. With a look any more intimidating than the one she currently wore, Hermione could have followed Professor Snape into Potions mastery, Draco mused.

Which is not to say that he was happy with being intimidated by a 5'5, half-human witch wearing a pink cardigan, mind you.

"You're the one who insisted we "fly" on this bloody contraption of theirs," Draco reminded Hermione with a scowl, leaving no doubt as to who he meant by theirs. "We could have apparated, or come by brooms."

"I am never flying tandem with you on a broom again, Malfoy! And thanks to someone I haven't got my own broom at the moment," was Hermione’s immediate response.

Her glare intensified and Draco shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

"That whole broom thing was entirely not my fault," Draco insisted with something like wounded dignity. Except that it was difficult for him to fake wounded dignity, when the "broom thing" had been entirely his fault. And both of them knew it. "And I'm sure the Ministry could have found it in their budget to provide you with another just for this one mission."

"They might have! If my last broom hadn't ended up..."

At just that moment the blonde stewardess from before came sashaying past, on her way to a passenger in one of the lower compartments. She smiled prettily at Draco as she did, and pointedly ignored Hermione altogether. Hermione flushed bright red, and stopped what she was saying mid-sentence.

Draco beamed.

"You were saying?" he asked, blinking innocent eyes at his companion, once the flight attendant was out of earshot.

Hermione collected herself, chin tilted upwards in that proud way she held herself whenever she'd been affronted and was trying to be mature about dealing with it. The corner of Draco's lips twitched persistently at the sight, and he nearly scowled again with the effort it took not to smile.

"And apparation is forbidden anywhere near the Hellmouth," Hermione went on, as if the broom argument hadn't even occurred. "You know that. Even if we apparated in somewhere outside the no-apparation zone, we'd still have to make our way into Sunnydale. It's just easier this way."

Draco shrugged, seeing that Hermione was taking up her magazine again, signaling the end of their discussion. For now.

Then Hermione threw him a look over the top of the issue of The Quibbler she was holding upside-down in her hands.

"And someone simply refuses to travel by floo, so Muggle transportation is our only choice."

Draco sniffed.

"I'm allergic to ash," he deadpanned.

Hermione made a sound behind her Quibbler that sounded suspiciously like a snort.  
"And soot does dreadful things to cashmere, you know," Draco went on. When he received no reaction, he sank down into his pillows with a little smirk. "But then, I don't suppose you do," he commented, almost to himself, eying her simple and inexpensive attire.

Hermione didn't even turn her eyes from her page.

But she did, very purposefully, uncross her legs and stomp on Draco's foot.

"Ow! Granger, are you bloody barmy? That hurt like hell!"

Hermione chuckled softly to herself.

In the meantime, Draco’s startled outcry had brought a number of stewardesses back to his side, but Hermione decided their presence was completely worth it. Draco sulked quietly to himself for the rest of the flight.

~[]~

The rest of their flight progressed without incident. Unless, of course, you considered Malfoy's almost inaudible grumbling - and the flight attendants' attempts to regain the pillow Hermione had snitched from their courtesy cart while they weren't looking - incidental.

Nonetheless, Hermione was not enjoying her now silent voyage to the States, and was absolutely disgusted with herself because of it. Draco Malfoy was the most infuriating git she'd ever had the questionable pleasure of not killing... She'd taken one, itty-bitty stand to avenge herself for all the wrongs Malfoy had done to her over the years (in as much as pouting could be considered vengeance-worthy wrongdoing, and in the way that stomping on a man's foot could be considered vengeance)...

And she felt guilty about it.

It was absolutely disgusting.

Apparently, while Draco's penchant for the occasional violent outburst had rubbed off somewhat, his ability to seem completely remorseless afterwards was not of the catchy variety. Hermione couldn't even pretend not to feel foolish for having lost her temper and acted childish towards him. She was nearly giddy with relief when their flight was over. Malfoy, while often inconsiderate, was anything but oblivious. He had - to her mortification - obviously picked up on her discomfort, and his earlier scowl had softened further and further into a smug little sneer.

And what really got Hermione's blood boiling was the fact that she hadn't even stomped hard. If she'd known how much Malfoy was going to torment her later, she might have aimed at breaking his foot. Or at least one small toe.

Hermione narrowed her eyes and tried not to scream as Malfoy limped off the plane in front of her. The blonde flight attendant that Malfoy had been flirting with most attentively was trying to glare at Hermione inconspicuously, and a fellow passenger had taken it upon himself to walk with Malfoy out the exit. Just in case Malfoy should trip, he said, though the hand he pressed against the small of Malfoy's back didn't look like it was resting there for that purpose.

Hermione, busy imagining a world in which she could hex everyone within a half-mile radius of her and not get caught, didn't even smirk, though the expression of sudden alarm and dismay that spread across Draco's face at that was quite funny.

Sometimes Malfoy forgot that females weren't of the only gender vulnerable to his pureblooded charm, at least so far as Muggles were concerned.

Hermione finally felt her anger beginning to slip away as the poor bloke, now walking towards the luggage carousel with them, continued to ignore Malfoy's many insistences that, yes, he was okay, and Hermione could help him just fine, thank you.

Hermione blinked innocently and hung a few steps back as if to say, 'Who? Me?' For which she earned herself a look that would have made her hair stand on end if she hadn't absolutely been enjoying herself.

It was only after the man had introduced himself, and had actually asked for a phone number, that Hermione decided to step in. Both because she feared for all their lives should Draco be given time to respond to such a request, and because she was already so close to splitting her sides with laughter that it was painful.

She kindly, but firmly, insinuated herself between the Muggle and her partner, and somehow managed to steer Malfoy and their luggage away before said Muggle could find himself at the wrong end of an angry Malfoy's wand.

"That wasn't funny, Granger," Draco told her with narrowed eyes as they walked away, Hermione now laughing outright. She quieted down a bit, took one look at him and the way he was silently shuddering, all indignant, wounded male pride, and began to laugh again, so hard that tears came to her eyes.

"Oh, yes it was!" she insisted between gasps. Draco's wand hand flinched, reflexively. But he felt the corners of his mouth twitch as well, despite himself. It was hard to stay angry in the face of the Muggle-born's laughter; Draco very rarely got to see her in such a state. And his wand hand flinched again as he, with a good deal of horror, realized that he'd just been thinking what a shame it was that he didn't get to see Hermione laugh more often. Her eyes sparkled when she laughed, and she had tiny little dimples on either side of her small mouth.

Draco nearly tripped over his own feet as he caught himself realizing this.

He was not seriously thinking about Granger's eyes and mouth, was he? Respecting and even appreciating the woman's company, in a professional capacity, was one thing - Draco had long ago come to terms with the fact that he rather liked working with the witch, as opposed to most of their fellow Aurors. Actually wanting to be in her personal company on a regular basis was another animal entirely.

One that might bite.

"And for Merlin's sake, Malfoy, stop limping! Your foot doesn't even hurt!" Hermione sighed in exasperation.

Malfoy smirked.

"It might. You've got quite a stomp there, Granger. I suppose years of kicking the Weasel's arse to keep him in line have paid off," he teased, relieved to be back on surer ground. "Oi, now, don't look at me like that! You should be proud of your talents. I'm a bit impressed myself. Never pegged you as the physical type, Granger." Malfoy leered and winked, just for good measure.

Hermione snorted with a roll of her eyes. If Draco was disappointed that his barbs got no more reaction out of her than that, he didn't show it.

"Never you mind what type I am, Malfoy," she said, pointedly ignoring the double meaning in his words, as he chuckled. "Although, speaking of types, I am curious as to when you became the damsel in distress sort of..."

"Damsel..." All chuckling stopped as Malfoy stared at her.

"It's no wonder you've got yourself a gentleman caller. Limping like a wounded soldier..."

"Gentleman call.... Granger!" he sputtered.

"...and dressed like that! Cashmere isn't the manliest of fabrics, you know, Malfoy," Hermione continued, unabated. If her eyes had been sparkling before, now they were virtually aglow. She nearly had to stop Malfoy from walking into a post as they weaved their way through the terminal towards the rental car office near the front. Her plan was, in part, to distract Malfoy from realizing they were in fact going to rent a car, and in part a means of paying him back for that "Weasel" jibe.

Hermione stopped outside the office and turned, nearly having to hold out her hands and stop Malfoy from walking into her, as well.

Bumping into six feet of impeccably clad, most definitely not delicate, Auror was not the way for a girl to keep her mind on questioning said Auror's masculinity.

Hermione frowned, stepping back and damning whatever demon had been cruel enough to sell Malfoy a cologne that smelled that nice, back to the farthest depths of hell.

"You should try something less feminine," she babbled, continuing trying to distract.

"Like flannel or..."

"Flannel! That's it, Granger, one more word and we're going to duel, I bloody well..."

"...leather or..."

Abruptly, Hermione's mind caught up with her mouth. 'Oh, dear God, don't let him listen to the advice about the leather!' she prayed, and snapped her mouth firmly shut.

Malfoy looked as though he'd been hit upside the head with something blunt.

He was either stunned by her audacity, her suddenly odd and nervous behavior, or - still - by the unforgivable suggestion that something like flannel be put on his person.

Perhaps it was a combination of all of the above. Hermione had never babbled or teased Malfoy quite so much. But then, she'd never been this far out into the Muggle world with Malfoy before. And desperate times called for desperate measures.

"Stay. right. here," Hermione told him, wagging her finger as if at a child, then swept into the office behind her before she could blush too bright a red.

Malfoy blinked, then glanced up at the sign hanging above the door into which Granger had disappeared. Then he looked again and his eyes widened.

"Rent-a-what? Granger!"

~[]~

The history of the American Magical Community was really quite fascinating, if one could put aside one's biases and appreciate the complexity of American culture.

America had no Ministry of Magic of its own; rather, American witches and wizards used a localized form of government that gave each small magical community in the country the right to govern itself. The communities each had their own school, their own hospitals, their own legal charters, and operated under the direction of their own elected governors. Each governor, then, had the right to elect his or her own representative to speak, on behalf of the community, before the tri-annual American Magical Conference in Cory (America's largest magical city and official magical capital).

The Conference performed a number of services for cooperating magical communities, and supervised negotiations with: non-cooperating American magical communities, foreign magical communities, and non-magical or "alternatively-magical" associations such as The Watchers Council (a British-based organization which dealt with magical creatures, or persons who weren't considered magical in the traditional sense - like Watchers, Wiccans, Slayers, and Mages). The Conference resolved minor national and international disputes, carried out public service initiatives, worked with the American Center for Muggle Studies in Salem to improve Muggle/Magical relations, and appointed ambassadors to deal directly with the members of the different magical sects listed above.

At least, it had. Up until about the time of the second Muggle World War. Before that, British/American Magical relations had already been strained by political differences (most of which originated from the American Revolution, in which the Ministry had refused to participate). During the war, an unfortunate misunderstanding nearly caused outright conflict between the Conference, the Council, and the Ministry. And after the war, the ever-reclusive Council became even more so, nearly withdrawing from International Magical Affairs altogether. The Conference and the Ministry nearly ceased communications between Magical America and Britain. Certain British wizards' associations began an anti-American campaign, and the British purebloods erased all of the Magical bloodlines that resettled in America from their now "non-existent" Subcriptio Prosapia.

Now the Conference had only two ambassadors for matters not presented by their cooperating communities: one for handling PR with other Magical Americans, and one for handling PR with just about everyone else. Members of the Council were given restricted access to Magical entry points throughout the country (access that was not to be extended to the many Watchers, Slayers, etc. for which the Council was responsible) and foreign wizards and witches had to petition for the Magical equivalent of a Muggle Visa in order to conduct any business on American soil that had not been mentioned in the Treaty of Harrow Square .

Hermione watched Draco waiting outside the Rent-a-Car office through the frosted glass of the window in its front door. The paperwork involved in acquiring a rental turned out to be taking a lot longer than she had hoped, and she'd had to toss Draco some reading material to keep him busy (and not yelling at anyone, or wandering off to explore something and get them both into trouble).

Not Hermione's own reading material, of course. Draco would probably rather read the back of a Muggle cereal box than any one of the texts Hermione had brought along for their trip (including American Magical History, Magical Treatises of the Past One-Thousand Years, and American Magical Law: A Retrospective).

Instead, Draco was scowling down at a copy of Woman's Day Hermione had picked out of a stack of magazines sitting in the office's waiting area, mistakenly having forgotten to look at the magazine's title before inflicting it upon her partner.

She sighed.

For the first time, Hermione understood the Conference's foreign policies. Getting permission to visit the Hellmouth had taken a ridiculously long amount of time (even though investigating magical phenomena was covered by the Treaty). But if she were a governor of the Conference, she wouldn't want wizards like Malfoy traipsing into the country on a whim. Malfoy could be charming and charismatic in a political setting, thoughtful in times of emergency, courageous in battle; he'd been the life - and quite nearly the death - of every party Hermione had ever seen him attend. But he simply could not function under circumstances less dramatic.

Draco made even reading a magazine look suspicious and unnatural. He kept trying to talk to the pictures in the advertisements (although Hermione knew Draco had seen countless Muggle photographs, even owned a television, and realized that none of them were going to talk back.) He also held the magazine as though he were afraid of what it might do if he manhandled it, and kept flashing the cover at Hermione through the window and mouthing 'You're still trying to be funny, aren't you?'

Despite herself, Hermione couldn't stop smiling.

Some people were just not meant to blend in, and Draco Malfoy was one of them.

~[]~

"A Volvo. That's what they've given us."

"Yes, Malfoy, a Volvo." Hermione watched Draco with a mixture of bemusement and concern as they approached the parking space the rental clerk had specified. And some amount of trepidation as well, as Hermione didn't like the way Draco was rolling the car's name around on his tongue. He seemed to be trying to remember where he'd heard it - or something similar to it - before.

"Hmph," he said finally. "Well. If this automobile is anything like the last one I was in, I have to say the name is terribly misleading."

Hermione glanced at him through the corner of her narrowed eyes.

"I don't want to know what you mean by that, Malfoy," she said, then added, emphatically: "I don't."

Malfoy closed his mouth.

"Oh, look! We're here," Hermione said quickly, spotting the small, silver car in question.   
Malfoy glanced at her through the corner of his eye.

"This can only end badly, Granger. You know this, don't you?"

Hermione glanced back, sighed, and looked away. The Volvo sat there in front of them, silent in its parking spot, waiting.

"Think happy thoughts, Malfoy," Hermione told her partner. "We've already survived a flight on an airplane, haven't we? How much more difficult can a car ride actually be."

~[]~

What a lot of people didn't realize about Draco Malfoy was that he did have a serious side. He simply chose rarely to show it. And the few people who'd known him well enough to have seen Malfoy being logical and serious, were the type smart enough to keep that sort of information to themselves. Or were the type who either couldn't share, or wouldn't be believed if they did.

For example, Millicent and Vin - two of Draco's old school friends - were dead; Tim and Moon were both in Azkaban. Greg was alive and free, but - thanks to his past as a Death Eater - had the credibility of a blast-ended skrewt. Draco had enough dirt on Blaise Zambini to keep him quiet for at least a lifetime, and Pansy Parkinson wasn't saying much the last time Draco had checked in with her at her private room in St. Mungo's. Draco's father and godfather were also dead and his mother had been as chatty as a dead sea scroll before The War. It wasn't likely she'd go blabbing his secrets now.

The only other persons - besides the diminutive Auror sitting next to Draco in the Volvo - to have ever seen Draco's serious side were Draco's old Quidditch captain, Marcus Flint, and Harry Potter. Flint had been trying to ruin Draco's reputation by praising his character for years, but no one ever believed him. And Potter - with Draco's blessings - tried to keep their peculiar friendship as hush-hush as possible. It was very likely that the Daily Prophet would start declaring The Man Who Killed Voldemort mad again if his reconciliation with a Malfoy ever became public knowledge.

But the main point of all this secrecy and such was, really, the protection of other people. People who hadn't seen Malfoy's serious side. And therefore didn't realize that that part of him wasn't quite as pretty as the rest.

For the first time, Draco considered the possibility that Hermione Granger had similar rules to his. That perhaps she shielded the people around her from her own serious side. Which was, quite simply, a disturbing thought. Draco had always thought Hermione quite serious enough.

He'd had no idea.

“If you do that one more time, Granger, I’m going to hex your hands to the steering wheel.”

Hermione turned and scowled at him, chin slightly tilted upward in indignance.

“This is how you’re supposed to drive, Malfoy,” she said, switching lanes and sticking her arm out the window - elbow bent in a manner that supposedly signaled the direction she was headed - as she did.

Draco made a noise somewhere between a drawn-out groan and a high-pitched whine as he gestured at the vehicles that were on the road with them.

“Then why aren’t any of them driving that way?” he insisted.

“I don’t know!” Hermione practically yelled, the stress of the entire driving experience finally getting to her. If she had thought that Draco had taken the news of his having to travel in a rental car surprisingly well, she had thought too soon. The pureblood had been a wealth of questions, comments and criticisms ever since they had left the airport. And whenever Malfoy wasn’t talking, one of Hermione’s fellow drivers was honking, trying to shoulder past her in traffic, making gestures that sorely tested her restraint from pulling out her wand, or riding up close enough on the Volvo’s bumper, Hermione was sure the other driver could smell the scent of her shampoo.

On top of all of that, Hermione had to pay attention to road signs and stop lights, and watch her speed - which was nowhere near as easy to do in actual traffic as it had been on the dirt roads Arthur had taken her down near the Burrow.

“In the driver’s manuals, it clearly states that you can’t always rely on your blinkers to let other motorists know you intend to turn. I do not want to get us rear-ended, Malfoy.”

Draco would almost certainly have said something inappropriate to that. But he was preoccupied with other thoughts.

“Driver’s manuals?” he repeated. “Granger, you’re Muggleborn. Why in Merlin’s name would you need to read a driver’s manual?”

“Muggles aren’t born knowing how to drive a car, Draco,” Hermione said irritably, as a large truck to the left of them cut into their lane at an unsettling speed. Hermione had to hit her brakes to avoid ramming right into the back of it. “ And neither are their children. Anyhow, it’s not like there was a lot of time for driving lessons when we came of age. There was The War to worry about. And then my parents…”

Hermione cut her sentence short with a curse as she realized they were coming up on their exit too quickly, and she hadn’t yet moved into the exit lane. She gripped the steering wheel tightly and swerved to the right, eliciting a chorus of honks and screams from the drivers she’d disturbed in the process.

Draco had both hands clutching the seat beneath him. He thought back briefly to their ride on the plane and the seat cushion those stewardesses had claimed could be used as a “floatation device.” He hadn’t thought much of the notion at the time, but realized suddenly that such an invention might become handy if Hermione kept driving the way that she was.

He hadn’t missed her uncharacteristic use of his first name, or the fact that she had cursed - which she almost never did. Or the slight hesitation in Hermione’s voice as she had mentioned her parents.

Draco felt a sliver of unease snake through him, as he always did when that subject arose, and quickly steered their conversation away from any talk of his or Hermione’s families.

“So you taught yourself to drive from a book. That is so unsurprising I might weep, Granger.”

Hermione took her eyes off the exit ramp momentarily, to look at him, then turned back to her driving as Draco suppressed a grateful sigh.

Having picked up on what Draco was doing, and feeling somewhat better for having put the freeway behind them, Hermione felt generous enough to enlighten Draco a bit further about her skills with driving a car.

“Actually,” she admitted with much relish, “Mr. Weasley taught me.”

Hermione smiled as Draco muttered something to himself about “nutters”, “mercy”, and Albus Dumbledore. As he had never learned to pray, that was about as close as Draco could get to asking for divine salvation.

~+[]+~

Hermione and Draco were relatively quiet and happy for the rest of the trip toward Sunnydale. There were fewer cars out on the two-lanes than on the freeway they’d been on before, so Hermione was doing a lot less swerving and swearing. Draco had either run out of questions, or had gotten bored with getting answers he could rarely comprehend or care about. The only blemish on an otherwise problem-free trip, in fact, came when Draco cast an Incendio on their map and Hermione had to pull over to the side of the road so they could put out the fire, repair the damage to the Volvo’s interior, and argue about whether or not the map (which Draco had been unable to refold once he had unfolded it) had deserved a fiery death.

By the time they reached Sunnydale it was dark, and Hermione and Draco were so preoccupied as they neared the town’s welcome sign that they didn’t immediately realize something was wrong. Draco was busy sulking over the map argument (which Hermione had perceivably won) and Hermione was busy reveling in her victory and the silent drive time it had afforded her.

Draco was drifting in and out of sleep and Hermione was practically dozing off herself when she finally realized that they had reached their destination and that doing so had been the least of their problems.

Eyes snapping wide open suddenly, Hermione gripped the steering wheel and - in a moment of thoughtless panic - slammed on the brakes.

The Volvo skidded and swerved across the, thankfully, empty road, then tore into the ditch on the right shoulder, throwing up dirt as it came to a jarring halt. As soon as she had lost control of the car, Hermione had started to scream, and Draco had produced his wand.

Neither reaction proved helpful.

In the ditch, Hermione could do no more than stare out the Volvo’s dirtied windshield with wide eyes, and Draco, who’s reflexes had acted without his conscious thought, had cursed the nearest thing to her - the driver’s side car door. The door, in one brief, bright flash of light, disappeared. Leaving two highly frazzled Aurors breathing heavily and staring at one another with growing alarm and, in Draco’s case, mystification.

“Granger!” he hissed, voice gone low and abrasive - as it tended to do when Draco was at his most angry or threatened. Seeing as the car door hadn’t been attacking Hermione when he’d killed it, and that nothing else appeared to be making a similar attempt, Draco was understandably unsettled. “What the bloody fuck do you think you’re…”

“Draco!” Hermione interrupted as soon as she’d recaptured her breath long enough to speak. “We’re in Sunnydale!”

Draco shook his head to dispel the ringing that had begun in his ears. He felt, at last, something warm and fluid trickling down his face and realized he’d been cut when the car had gone off the road and he’d been thrown into the windshield. Only his Auror reflexes - which had had him bracing himself against the front dash with his boots - had kept him from slamming straight through it, rather than just against it. His knuckles were bruised and bleeding from when he’d further tried to catch himself against the glass. Small cracks, like spider-webs, marked everywhere he and the glass had come into contact.

Draco gave a vague thought to the fortunate fact he hadn’t snapped his wand when he’d hit. Not that the now non-existent driver’s side car door would have agreed that his wand’s having survived the accident was altogether fortunate.

Hermione had fared somewhat better, having had the sense to keep her seatbelt on throughout their entire trip. She had somehow split her lip, however, all the same, and blood had run out the corner of her mouth in a small trickle. Upset and confused, Draco allowed other emotions to overcome the concern that swelled up in him at the sight, unanalyzed.

“Great!” Draco replied, trying to keep the shrillness out of his voice. “That’s just great, Granger. And this is cause to try and fucking kill us how?”

“We’re in Sunnydale!” Hermione persisted. “On the Hellmouth! Draco, think! Feel.”

Draco shook his head again, thinking perhaps that Hermione was far more injured from the crash than she appeared.

“Feel? Is that what you say to me after trying to propel me out of the bloody car! Feel? I don’t fucking feel any…” Abruptly, Draco’s words faded away and the meaning behind Hermione’s words hit him harder than the windshield had before.

He didn’t feel anything. Not from the Hellmouth. Any witch or wizard worth his or her weight in fizzing whizbees could feel the magical energy radiating from a Hellmouth from miles away. Not to mention when they were parked, crashed, whatever practically on top of one.

If Draco’s heart had been racing before it was reaching new speeds now.

“Draco, the Hellmouth is gone!” Hermione continued, as Draco could do nothing more than nod, dazedly, in agreement.

Unless both he and his partner had somehow suddenly turned into squibs (vaporized car doors notwithstanding) the Hellmouth was gone. And had been for some time if neither of them could feel so much as a trace of dark magic from this distance.

And for whatever reason, the Watcher’s Council - who had the foremost authority over Hellmouths and other such phenomena (at least in the States) - had not considered this development important enough to mention to the Ministry. Neither had the Conference.

International Magical relations were about to get a lot more fascinating.


	2. Chapter 2

Acquiring a motel room turned out to be ridiculously simple, to Draco’s way of thinking.

Not that Draco had any prior experience with acquiring motel rooms. But any establishment willing to give a Malfoy a key to anything, without so much as a firetalk with the local authorities, was alright by Draco - and firmly reinforced Draco’s general estimation of Muggle common sense (i.e. that they have none, and are extremely bad judges of character).

Of course, the desk clerk’s easy cooperation with the Auror might have had more to do with the extraordinary amount of money he’d thrown down on the counter (Draco never paid attention when someone tried to teach him about Muggle currency) than with Draco’s character.

But Draco was not overly concerned.

Hermione laid down on the bed nearest the door, closing her eyes the second her head hit the pillow.

“With spending habits like yours, Malfoy,” she sighed, “It’s no wonder your family’s been evil for generations. Good deeds don’t pay well enough for five-hundred dollar tips.” The tone of Hermione’s voice stated clearly that - had her head not been pounding quite so hard - she would have had a lot more to say on the subject.

Draco raised a brow. “Never thought I’d see the day, Granger, when a Gryffindor admitted that evil pays.” He’d fetched a face cloth from the bathroom and was wetting it in the sink.

“Of course,” he went on, “Until my father, Malfoys had made most of their money off of investments, real estate, that sort of thing. Being evil was a recreational activity.”

Hermione was obviously not listening, drifting in and out of consciousness. Draco frowned. He’d given her a potion back at the car - thanking Professor Snape, all the while, for having imbued him with the importance of keeping a well-stocked potions kit at his side at all times. As it turns out, Hermione had hit her head during the crash. The potion would take care of the concussion she might have suffered at that time, so it was safe for Hermione to sleep.

It just wouldn’t do Draco’s rattled nerves any good, to see his petite partner laid out with blood still on her face, eyes closed and chest barely rising with each breath.

Also, Draco hated not being listened to.

Hermione awoke with a start, eyes opening wide, as she felt the bed dip beneath her and something warm press against her lips.

Luckily, Draco had thought to set her wand on the bedside table before he’d sat himself down beside her, otherwise there was no telling what might have become of him. As it was, rather than getting hexed, Draco only suffered a sharp jab to his solar plexus as Granger’s arm lashed out in search of her wand.

“Ow!” Draco slapped at the offending appendage with the wash cloth he’d been tending to Hermione’s lip with. “Bloody hell, woman, stop that!”

Hermione’s eyes focused on the man beside her, at last, and - if anything - widened further.

“Malfoy?”

She shook her head, as if trying to remember where she was and why, in Merlin’s name, she was there with Draco Malfoy.

Draco scowled in irritation.

“No, I’m Potter. But taller and with better hair.”

Hermione made a face at that, then winced as her split lip protested the movement.

“What on Earth are you doing?” she asked, and Draco arched one brow. He held up his wash cloth.

“Giving you a bath. I’m surprised you didn’t wake until now. The buttons on that blouse are an absolute nightmare.”

Hermione gasped, sitting straight up - eyes and hands going to her shirtfront…

And finding that not a stitch was out of place.

Draco laughed. He genuinely laughed. The sound was so startling and pleasant, Hermione almost forgot to be furious that he’d just tricked her.

Almost.

“Oh! You absolute prat!” Hermione hissed, cheeks bright red. She was more embarrassed, really, than angry. She’d never seen Malfoy so obviously pleased with himself.

“Relax,” Draco continued to chuckle. “Honestly. I may not be above debauching the occasional innocent, but I generally prefer for them to be awake when I do.’

Hermione was unamused. Or mostly unamused. Draco wagged his eyebrows at her and that was it.

Hermione swiped the wash cloth out of Malfoy’s hands and attempted to slap him over the head with it.

Draco ducked.

“Watch the hair, Granger!” he scolded, half-serious. “Is this the thanks I get for tending the poor and lame?”

“Poor and lame!” Hermione’s exclamation was followed by the sound of a satisfyingly wet plop.

“Hermione! I’ve warned you about the hair!”

 

~+[]+~

 

The sun was beginning to rise by the time Sunnydale’s visiting Aurors had tended to their wounds and allowed themselves a short nap.

Hermione awoke first and threw herself into the problem at hand, unshrinking a number of the chests she’d brought with her in her pocket. In them were her books, manuals, pamphlets on mission protocols…

Hermione blew a stray strand of hair out of her eyes, and added the last large text to one of the waist-high stacks she’d created throughout the room. And Ron and Harry had laughed, when she’d first told them she never left home without her library! There was no telling when an emergency would arise, and the information contained in those texts would be needed.

Of course, it would be more convenient if Hermione could carry with her a condensed version of all her books. The way Muggles carried about palm pilots and laptops. But Hermione’s work on a Wizarding version of the portable computer was still only in its preliminary stage, and Wizarding books were quite resistant to being condensed.

For example, Hermione’s copy of Goblin Sociology & the Impact of Isolation on the Goblin Psyche had still not forgiven her for having used it in one of her experiments. As soon as it was out of its chest, it leapt from Hermione’s hands, knocked over a stack of history tomes, and scuttled under the bed that Malfoy was sleeping on, to nibble at the carpet and generally be unapproachable.

Hermione sighed.

She would definitely have to remember to grab that one before she and Draco cleared out of the room. She could only imagine what a confrontation with an animated textbook on goblins would do to the psyche of the hotel’s cleaning crew.

Once unpacked, Hermione began searching through the texts now available to her for some sort of answer to the predicament they now found themselves in. Somehow, she had a feeling that actually getting her huge books out of their chests had been the easy portion of her task.

And speaking of tasks…

Hermione’s eyes went back to the Goblin Psyche text. It had inched out from under the dust ruffle of Draco’s bed and was ruffling its pages at her, tauntingly. Then Hermione’s eyes wandered upwards to the Auror sleeping above.

She was going to have to wake him up. She was going to have to wake him up and she was going to have to work with him today, without reaching up to trace her newly healed lip with her fingertips every few moments, remembering her partner’s uncharacteristic care of her.

Hermione caught herself doing it again, and scowled, lowering her right hand to clasp her left where it lay in her lap.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t ever seen Malfoy behaving considerately. He wasn’t at all as hard to work with as she and the others sometimes let on. With the exception of herself, Harry, Ron, Ginny, and Neville, Malfoy pretty much kept to himself while he was at the office, and while he was out of the office he was the consummate politician his father had raised him to be. He was frighteningly attentive to his demon of a mother. Hermione had even heard that he still visited Pansy Parkinson at St. Mungo’s on a regular basis, even despite his sordid history with the female Slytherin.

But Hermione had never been the focus of Malfoy’s considerate behavior before. Not as she had been earlier, when she’d woken to find him dabbing gently at her lip with a wet washcloth. She supposed she should be pleased with the development, and she was. She and the other Aurors in their department were relatively close. If it had been Harry or Ron or Nev who’d tried to help her, Hermione wouldn’t even have thought of it.

But this was Malfoy. And, somehow, that made everything entirely different. Not just because of their past… Of course not. But because-

‘Well.’ Hermione frowned. She wasn’t exactly sure of all of the reasons because. But she knew that her earlier embarrassment had had as much to do with her proximity to Malfoy as with his silly prank. Which was an altogether disturbing prospect. Hadn’t Hermione just been thinking, the day before, how peculiar it would be if she were actually beginning to enjoy Malfoy’s company? If he was actually beginning to endear himself to her.

Now she was getting all flustered simply because they’d sat on a bed together…

‘Oh, dear.’ They had, hadn’t they? Hermione hadn’t really considered that before. She’d been too preoccupied with the fact that, when she’d felt the warmth of the washcloth against her lips and woken up, for a moment… For a moment, she’d thought that he’d kissed her.

As if a disappearing Hellmouth and a possible international conspiracy weren’t phenomenal enough.

“What in…”

It wasn’t until Malfoy spoke that Hermione realized she’d become lost in thought, eyes staring unseeingly at the open pages of the text nearest to her. She looked up and saw that he was awake and sitting in bed, staring over it.

“Granger? Do Muggle books eat dust ruffles, or is this one of yours?”

“What?”

Sure enough, a glance back down confirmed that the Goblin Psyche text had gnawed a good portion of the bed’s dust ruffle away.

“Oh! Stop that!” Hermione made as if to charge the magical book, and it hurried back under the bed.

Malfoy shook his head. “Disgraceful,” he said, in a perfectly serious tone. “None of the books at the Manor would dare do damage to the upholstery. They know they’d have their spines broken if they did.”

Hermione gave him a pointed look - all previous thoughts of her pureblooded partner momentarily forgotten.

“What? They would. You’ve got to maintain discipline to keep a library, you know, Granger. Otherwise there would be chaos. Did I ever tell you about the time Crabbe’s Remedial Arithmancy books turned on him? Ugly is what that was. I‘d never seen Vince run like that in all my life.”

Despite herself, Hermione laughed.

 

~+[]+~

 

As Hermione conducted her research, Draco went about using the hotel room’s telephone to send an emergency call to the Ministry, reporting their status. The Ministry had long since devised this system so that Aurors could check in from Muggle locations when other forms of magical communication were unavailable. It was a simple system to use. In theory. One simply had to cast the Prideminus Fama while simultaneously entering in the proper identification code.

But in practice, the Ministry’s emergency systems were never that simple.

The Prideminus Fama was a complicated charm to cast; nowhere near your usual swish and flick. And the Ministry assigned all its Aurors identification codes that were seventeen characters long. If you typed them in right on the first try. They lengthened exponentially with every attempt after that.

Within moments Draco was glaring at the telephone sitting before him, and consulting the notes in the small, black leather notebook he usually kept in the inner pocket of his robes . He turned to page twenty-two: personal identification codes appropriate for the fifth attempt at using the Emergency Communications System…

Hermione didn’t look up from her copy of Hellmouths: Where to Find Them & Other Frequently Asked Questions. “That little book is against at least seven different regulations, you know,” she stated matter-of-factly.

Draco grimaced, but said nothing. He did know, actually. Although the correct number was something more like ten. Aurors were supposed to memorize their identification codes, using memory retaining charms if necessary. Draco didn’t see the point. His “little black book” doubled as his daily agenda and personal memoirs and so - naturally - had been charmed to swiftly dismember any unauthorized persons who should happen to try and read it. That charm alone accounted for two of the ten regulations the book was currently in violation of.

“This whole system is prejudiced against purebloods, you realize this, don’t you?” Draco proclaimed once he was at his wit’s end.

“It’s a touch tone phone, Malfoy. You can’t possibly be unable to use a touch tone phone. All you have to do is push the buttons.”

“Yes, but if you press too hard, the button sticks, or you end up hitting the same number twice. If you wait too long it resets, and then I’ve got even more bloody numbers to dial!”

Hermione felt dangerously tempted to snicker. She even looked up from her reading. “There’s a reason they call it the Emergency Communications System, Malfoy. So that Aurors only use it in an emergency.”

“Yes. And just to make sure you don’t forget, they make the system impossible to use! Doesn’t categorizing a situation as an emergency rather confirm the lack of time to be sitting about, punching numbers into a silly little Muggle machine?”

Hermione raised her brows. She watched Draco’s fingers as they worked over the face of the telephone.

“You just punched the nine key twice. There aren’t any consecutive nines in your authorization codes.”

Draco paused, then realized that she was right. “Damn!”

His eyes narrowed. “Granger… How did you know that?”

Hermione smirked. “There are no more than three “I”s in the discerpo tetigi either. You might remember that the next time you refresh that dismemberment hex.”

Hermione’s smirk became downright gleeful as Malfoy’s eyes bugged comically. She decided not to tell him that, really, she’d simply been paying attention the last six times he’d inputted his codes. She wouldn’t touch that black book if the secret of life itself were written inside of it. Malfoys were many things, but slouches in the hex department they were not.

Draco said a few colorful curses and then threw his hands in the air.

“Why in Merlin’s name am I even doing this? The purpose of having a Muggle-born partner is to not have to interact with filthy Muggle artifacts.”

The “filthy” bit rattled Hermione’s nerves, but she let it slide. Honestly, she often had trouble utilizing the ECS herself. Which was to be expected, she supposed. What had possessed Hermione to let Ron cast her memory retainment charms, Hermione would never know.

“No. The purpose of having a Muggle-born partner is to keep you from futzing up royally while trying to use a filthy Muggle artifact, in typical pureblood fashion,” Hermione countered coolly. “And don’t you dare do the same to that telephone as you did to the map! We have to contact the Ministry eventually!”

Draco lowered his wand and scowled.

 

~+[]+~

 

“And that’s it? A Hellmouth goes missing unbeknownst to the Ministry, and that’s all you have to tell us?”

“What more do you expect, Malfoy? This is the Watcher’s Council we’re talking about, after all. They’ve even more to do with the Hellmouths on American soil than those Yanks in Cory.”

Draco was standing at the foot of his bed - one of the few spaces in the room that wasn’t currently cluttered with Hermione’s research materials. Hermione perched on a nearby chest, the phone sitting on a stack of books between them. Thank goodness she’d learned how to work the speakerphone. Otherwise she’d have had to piece together what Zacharias was saying by Malfoy’s indignant asides alone.

“But doesn’t this sort of thing justify immediate action on our part, Zacharias?” Hermione asked. “They failed to report the absence of a Hellmouth to the Ministry of Magic! That’s a blatant violation of the Amsley Accords of ‘56. It’s like forgetting to check in and tell the Conference that a whole slew of Dementors have gone absent, and that we‘ve no idea where they‘ve gone!”

Draco raised a brow. “Trying to jinx us, Granger?’

Smith paid no attention. “The Ministry will be taking immediate action, Hermione. The Council will answer for this, make no doubt. But that isn’t your concern. The most you can do from your present location is locate the Council’s representative there. A Watcher by the name of Rupert Giles. His Slayer’s the oldest I’ve ever heard of. If anyone over there had something to do with the Hellmouth closing, she’s our likeliest bet.”

“I don’t make bets on Watchers and Slayers, Smith,” Draco said. “Or anything that spends the majority of its time in the presence of Dark creatures and calls itself a champion for the Light.”

Hermione threw a glance in Draco’s direction and frowned. She could practically hear Zacharias stewing over the enchanted phone. Zacharias had been a key member of Dumbledore’s Army; he was one of the more highly decorated members of their department. But his role during The War had been that of a duelist, not a diplomat. How he’d ended up in what basically amounted to a PR position within the Ministry was unclear. What was certain was that he’d never taken kindly to being spoken to in the way that Malfoy generally spoke to everyone.

“You just have to find her, Malfoy. And, more importantly, her Watcher,” Zacharias said. “Find out what they know about all of this. We’ll handle the Council and the Conference from here. And you’re an Auror. Any Dark creatures you encounter shouldn’t be a problem.”

Hermione resisted the urge to cringe. ‘Oh, dear…’ Though he’d said Auror, it was obvious that Zacharias had meant something entirely different, and as Hermione noticed Draco’s wand hand twitching, she quickly decided to intervene.

“We’ll do what we can, Zach. We’ll report back when we’ve learned something.”

Zacharias’s voice softened somewhat as he addressed his last bit to Hermione. “I’m sorry I haven’t anything else to tell you now. You’re right. This is a highly irregular situation. The Ministry will have to handle it carefully, and you should be careful, as well. If there is some sort of conspiracy going on down there, of whatever kind, we’d rather not lose two of our own to find out.”

Hermione nodded, still watching Draco out the corner of her eye as he crossed his arms over his chest and sat down on the bed. He was not happy, but he no longer looked ready to say something that could possibly get him suspended, either.

Hermione said a quick goodbye to Smith and cast the counter spell to the Prideminus Fama. Not wanting the silence that had fallen upon Malfoy to stretch any farther than it must, she said, cheekily:

“Well. I suppose we’ve got a bit of Slayer-hunting ahead of us, then.”

Malfoy, however, had already wiped whatever emotion had been in his expression clean from it. For the umpteenth time since she’d begun to know him, Hermione counted them all lucky that he’d defected when he had. The malicious if ineffectual boy of their Hogwarts days had grown into a man who could intimidate effortlessly when he wore that face.

Luckily, Draco didn’t wear it for long. His eyes lightened from a stormy grey to something less impassioned, and his expression softened within moments.

“Well, then, Granger, let’s get to it, shall we?”

Then, inexplicably, he took a shrunken chest from his pocket and headed towards the bathroom.

Hermione blinked. “Where are you going?”

“To change, of course. We hardly need to stay in these Muggle clothes to go traipsing about a cemetery in the middle of the night, now do we?”

 

~][~

 

As far as sympathy went, Hermione’s for Malfoy didn’t last long after they’d gotten off the telephone with Zacharias Smith. Not that Hermione wasn’t bothered when reminded that Malfoy’s life wasn’t the carefree existence he usually pretended it to be. It was simply difficult to remain sympathetic towards a man who owned more pairs of boots than Luna Lovegood did collector’s copies of The Quibbler (since her father’s death, Luna had taken to buying exactly twenty-three copies of each issue, stowing one immediately in her file cabinet at the office, and whisking the rest away to some undisclosed location for Merlin knows what purpose.)

This wouldn’t have even come to Hermione’s notice if Draco hadn’t thrown his staff in with his footwear when he’d packed for their trip.

“I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for this little jaunt, Granger. I’d just gotten back from Jerusalem the morning before,” Draco explained as he pulled boots out of the trunk in front of him left and right.

Hermione crossed her arms over her chest. She had taken Draco’s lead in showering and changing, although she knew there wasn’t much point as they were about to venture out into a cemetery - of all the dark, dirty places. They had learned - Draco most of all, Hermione supposed - to take advantage of what conveniences were afforded them while they had the chance. As Aurors, they never knew when they would be cut off from those exact same conveniences for long periods of time.

Unlike Draco, however, Hermione still wore Muggle clothing. She always had worn Muggle clothing, whenever at all possible. The Wizarding world had nothing on a pair of blue jeans and sneakers and a simple pullover where comfort and maneuverability were concerned, Hermione’d decided. Malfoy obviously disagreed. He wore a pair of dark trousers, that had no doubt been tailored, and a white dress shirt under a full set of dark robes. His hair was still slightly damp, as he claimed never to use a drying spell or - horror of all horrors - a blow dryer.

Hermione wondered why the scent of her shampoo - which Draco had borrowed - was so obvious on the Slytherin, and why it unsettled her so.

It was probably because of the boots. Draco owned every sort of boot imaginable. Large, clunky boots; sleek, tailor-made boots; tall riding boots. Thick black boots covered with buckles - like something out of a movie. Hermione blushed. Maybe she was just a prude, but Malfoy’s collection struck her as decidedly kinky.

Of course, this was Malfoy she was thinking about. He probably owned a dozen pair of everything in his wardrobe. And, as she’d overheard Malfoy saying at a party once - “Of course I’m kinky. I’m a Malfoy. And a Slytherin. There’s a reason they keep us in the dungeon, you know.”

“Ah. There it is,” Malfoy finally proclaimed, pulling his staff out of the chest. All of Malfoy’s luggage was charmed to be bottomless, so he could store his staff in the chest without first minimizing it. A good thing since simply finding the thing had taken so long. If Draco had desperately needed the staff, he wouldn’t have had time to enlarge it after digging it out of its chest. Although, in that situation, he would have plenty of boots to throw at his attacker until he’d figured something out.

Draco’s staff stood as tall as he did, and was made out of polished, ebony oak. It was as thick as Hermione’s arm and carved to look natural - not as perfectly straight and smooth as some of the staffs Hermione had seen used during The War. At the top of Draco’s staff sat the fist-sized pewter ball that focused the staff’s energy, encased by a winding criss-cross of wood - each, slender piece carved to look like a dozen tiny black snakes, their eyes inset with tiny emerald-colored stones. The bottom of Draco’s staff was slightly pointed and, Hermione knew, quite sharp.

She tried not to let her unease show in her expression. Several of the wizards and witches who fought on the frontlines during The War had used staffs. That was practically the weapon of choice for Death Eaters during the second wave of battles, and the DA had learned to fight fire with fire. But only a few warriors on either side were really good with the staff. Harry, of course, although now he wouldn’t touch one if he had to. Ron might have had skill if he hadn’t had the tendency to bump his staff into things while he was trying to arch. Ernie McMillan, surprisingly, had been a quick study with the dreadful things.

But Draco’s command of the staff was unparalleled now that his father and Professor Snape and Millicent Bullustrode were gone. During The War, he’d been even better with the staff than Harry, as Harry had always hesitated to wield that sort of power over his enemies, save for Voldemort. Draco simply hadn’t cared. Another reason his defection had been timely to the Order and Dumbledore’s Army.

Draco had taken such a liking to his staff, in fact, that he carried it with him on missions even now, when staffs were somewhat less fashionable.

Less fashionable as in no one wanted anything to do with them, and would promptly run in the other direction whenever Malfoy was spotted wielding his. Which was the main reason he did it, of course. Other than one or two incidents over the last three years, Hermione hadn’t heard of Malfoy’s actually having had to use his staff as anything more than a conversation piece.

Not that those conversations - with suspected Dark wizards under interrogation - hadn’t been absolutely fascinating.

“Granger.”

Hermione realized she’d been staring at the same space for some moments when Malfoy spoke her name and pressed the crest on the underside of his staff’s head. The long weapon minimized until it was slightly less than wand-sized, and Malfoy slipped it into the holster strapped to the inside of his forearm, beneath his shirt sleeve.

Hermione looked up and saw the questioning concern in Malfoy’s eyes and shook herself with a frown. She tried to lighten the mood that had set over them with an exaggerated, “Good. Now can we get to the Slayer-hunting? Or did you pack your traipsing-about-in-a-cemetery boots in a chest full of scarves?”

Draco didn’t miss a beat, recognizing Hermione’s jibe for what it was.

“Actually, no. They’re back at the Manor. But I can make do.”

 

~][~

 

The cemeteries were everything Hermione had expected them to be.

There were just so damned many of them.

“I will never understand how anyone can live near a Hellmouth, and not realize that there is something unnatural about this place,” Hermione said as they made their way through the third graveyard of the evening.

They paused and scanned the immediate area for any signs of life or its indirect opposite. Draco nudged a leaning headstone with the toe of one boot, but rather than slipping back into place, the headstone tilted onto its side into a bed of weeds.

Draco frowned. “You know most of all that people see what they want to see, Granger,” he said. “What did your little Muggle friends say the first time you levitated a tea cup, or animated a stuffed bear so it could play with you?”

Hermione grinned, more because of the visuals Draco’s words inspired than because of their validity. Hermione hadn’t had any Muggle friends when she was a child. Until Harry and Ron, she hadn’t had any friends. But the thought of a young Draco, tiny and angelic looking as he’d been when he was a boy, having tea with a small army of animated teddy bears, chased away any melancholia those thoughts might have otherwise brung to life.

Not that Hermione was often melancholic over her childhood. She wouldn’t trade her history with Harry or Ron for a thousand girlhood playmates.

“Is that how your magic first manifested itself, then?” Hermione asked, sidestepping a large, stone urn than had fallen into the path she was walking between two rows of graves. From several rows over, Draco snorted. He replied as they continued their search, their voices carrying softly in the gloom.

“Hardly. I kept turning the house elves upside down. Not sure why. I was only two, you know.”

Hermione raised a brow. “That’s early.”

She knew that Draco was smirking without looking at him. “Of course I was early, Granger. All the most powerful wizards are. At least that’s what Father liked to say.”

Hermione rolled her eyes. “I’m sure.”

They had nearly crossed half the cemetery when Draco turned to her again.

“So what was it, Muggle-born? Floating tea cups or dancing bears?”

Hermione threw him an irritated look, and said nothing, though she really didn’t mind the question. It was peculiar talking with Malfoy as much as she had been during this trip.

Peculiar…but not unpleasant. Consistent comments on her heritage notwithstanding.

“Purple hair,” she told Draco finally. She met him in the middle of the cemetery, near a cluster of large, old oaks.

“What?”

“I turned my father’s hair purple. Every time he came back from a convention and didn’t bring me anything. I’m sure I didn’t even know I was doing it. But his hair kept turning purple, and making me happy was the only way to change it back. It didn’t take my parents long to figure out that I was the cause each time something like that happened, even as fantastical as the thought must have seemed then.”

Draco raised a brow. “Quite. I must admit, Granger, I’m impressed. Glamour charms are a bit advanced for a manifestation.”

It was Hermione’s turn to smirk. “Of course I was advanced, Malfoy,” she mocked. “All the most powerful witches are.”

Draco made a face at the bad joke, but his lips remained un-sneering and he said, “I’ll refrain from comment on that.”

Hermione studied him quietly while he wasn’t looking, then resisted the urge to look nervously away when he was. She realized that she and Malfoy had just conducted perhaps the first conversation they’d ever had that didn’t involve work, Harry, or insults - either harmless or not - towards someone or something. Malfoy had begun to endear himself to her. And either the sentiment was mutual, or her fellow Auror had mellowed a lot more in recent days than Hermione had thought. She’d only needed an opportunity to notice.

Draco looked startled when he became aware of Hermione’s consideration of him. He tensed, no doubt fearing that Hermione had seen some threat near them that he had missed. “What?” he asked.

Hermione thought back to their conversation with Zacharias, and to Malfoy’s comments about the Dark.

“You know, Malfoy,” she said thoughtfully. “Some people see what is.”

And that, of course, was when the creature that had been perched in the tree branches above them chose to make his debut.

 

~][~

 

“Granger!” Draco warned, about a split second before the vampire actually appeared, dropping to his feet behind Hermione.

Hermione had hit the ground before Malfoy had finished speaking, her wand in her hand, her right foot lashing out at the vampire. The kick connected with the vamp’s lower abdomen, and would have brought him down if he hadn’t caught Hermione’s ankle when he did. He pulled, dragging Hermione towards him.

But it was too late for him to do more than that. Draco had already fired off a hex - and like a single ray of light, the Solarum hit the vampire in the chest, disintegrating the beast where it stood. All of this had taken seconds. The next confrontation would undoubtedly take longer, as - suddenly - two more vamps had dropped out of the tree from above, and three of their friends walked around from behind it.

“Well,” Hermione took an involuntary step nearer Malfoy, even as she drew up her wand in the Gryffindor dueling position and narrowed her eyes. “The Hellmouth’s left town, but the vampires are still here.”

Draco gave her a look out the corner of his eye and tapped his wand against hers - a gesture Hermione had noticed he and Harry exchanging before battles in the past.

“The trip hasn’t been a waste, then,” he drolled.

And then the vampires came at them.

 

~][~

 

Draco had always been remarkably sensitive to the presence of Dark creatures.

This was unsurprising. The Malfoys were traditionally Dark themselves, and Draco had been exposed to more of that side of the magical world than most wizards. On top of that, he’d trained under - and later fought beside - a werewolf, and the closest thing he’d ever had to a confidant had been a Veela.

But this sensitivity had begun early into Draco’s childhood. It might even have been investigated as a sign of special magical abilities…if Draco hadn’t always had the sense to keep it to himself. Admitting that he could, apparently, sense Dark things coming was much too close to admitting that he was terrified of said things. And Draco’s father would not have reacted well to such an admission. So Draco had kept his strange intuition secret, and put on a brave face (at least when in the presence of his father and his father’s minions). Now, after having battled Dark creatures and wizards and witches for most of his adult life, Draco relied on his intuition constantly, and made no secret of why.

Which was probably what had gotten him this assignment, come to think of it. No one back at the Ministry would have sent him into Muggle territory if he hadn’t had an advantage over his peers where dealing with vampires and demons (and other such inhabitants of a Hellmouth) were concerned. And they certainly wouldn’t have sent him with Hermione Granger. Not even Potter’s faith in him and the acclaim he’d won for his participation in The War was enough to get Draco sent out alone with the Ministry’s most renowned researcher.

Not that Granger particularly needed the Ministry to select her partners. She could quite take care of herself. Provided she wasn’t given time during a fight to stop and use that frightful intellect of hers and forget to fight back.

So Draco’s alarm, when he’d heard the rustle of leaves and felt the slight prickling at his senses that announced the first vampire’s appearance, was probably a bit unnecessary.

The unease that crept up upon him when the vampire’s friends appeared, however, was justified. Vampires were short work compared to basilisks and manticores and Dark Lords with armies of followers. But bigger men had fallen to lesser evils, and Draco knew it. He couldn’t be too careful with these creatures. Especially as they outnumbered him and Hermione by almost three to one.

Luckily the vampires exercised no such caution. Obviously thinking that their prey was nothing out of the ordinary, and wasting no time or discussion on either of them, they charged in a very straightforward manner. Making them easy to pick off with standard hexes.

Draco turned towards the three vamps that had come round the tree, while Hermione turned to the two who had landed to the left of her. She cast a quick Solare Totale, blinding the vamps long enough to hex one with the Solarum and to dodge the other. Draco cast a Percussum Asser at his trio of opponents, three slim whiffs of smoke shooting from the tip of his wand and forming into ghostly-looking stakes that solidified as they neared their targets.

The stakes hit two of the three vampires, killing one immediately and piercing the other just far enough to slow the vamp to a stop. Draco had to follow through and, with a well-aimed kick, drive the stake home into the vamp’s heart.

Meanwhile, the third vamp - who had previously been standing between his two companions - had leapt to avoid a similar fate, and had landed behind Draco on his feet. The stake that had been meant for him had lodged in his thigh, but the vampire paid it no mind.

The second vampire Draco had staked hadn’t yet fully turned to ashes by the time the pureblood whirled, his wand pointed at his final opponent. The vamp’s fangs were bared, its face contorted into the demonic form its kind adopted when ready to feed.

The vampire turned to ash before Draco could so much as open his mouth. Standing in its place was Hermione with her wand outdrawn. She had used the wand as a stake and had struck down the vamp for him.

Draco blinked. Behind his partner he could see two piles of ashes on the ground, signifying that Hermione had managed to take care of them, as well.

If it had been Potter who had just come to his aide, Potter would have been grinning like a loon and bragging that he could add an extra mark to his score card. Draco would have sneered and said something cutting, but then he would have bought them a round of drinks back at the nearest pub and smiled to himself while Potter wasn’t looking. If it had been Longbottom that had helped him, Draco would have been appalled and showed it, and Neville would have flushed and stammered, and finally spouted off in uncharacteristic anger. Draco would then have made Neville buy them a round of drinks, and would have spent the rest of the night blowing the poor chap’s mind with uncharacteristic cheer and friendly banter.

If it had been Weasley who had been participating in this little skirmish with him, Draco thought - half believing it - they would probably both be dead right now, and Draco would be kicking the other Auror’s ass all the way from one end of Hell to the other.

Hermione simply smiled, looking extraordinarily smug. On Harry, the expression was part irritating, part amusing - on Hermione, somehow the look caused Draco to forget what he was going to say and simply stare.

“Well. That was almost fun,” Hermione said, surprising Draco into another stunned blink. Granger didn’t get out on a lot of the more physical assignments.

Then the look on her face changed, and her eyes shifted just over Draco’s shoulder. Draco would have known from that alone that something new was approaching them, but with his sensitivity to the Dark kicking in he was certain of it.

“Who the-”

The voice coming from behind him barely registered, as Draco turned and brought his wand with him.

“Draco!” Hermione called out, too late. Draco had already taken aim and was casting an Expelliarmus.

In result, the dark-haired young woman who’d been approaching them flew off her feet and backward, landing several feet away on her back. She lay very still, and Hermione and Draco stood, silent, as the dust settled.

Then they looked at one another.

As one, they rushed to the young woman’s side. Hermione knelt beside her, and Draco crouched nearby, taking one quick glance around to make certain they were alone.

They were. No more vampires had appeared. The cemetery was empty, save of its grave stones, Hermione, Draco…and the human Draco had just hexed off her feet.

Hermione blinked. “Oh…dear,” she stuttered, quietly.

The young woman was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, under a brown leather jacket. She wore a cross around her neck, and - lying near a grave stone some distance away - there was the stake that she’d had clasped in one hand. She was very much alive. Very much not a vampire.

And very much not your average Californian girl, if the slightly magical aura she was giving off was to be believed.

Draco and Hermione had found their Slayer.

 

~+[]+~

 

The thing about closing Hellmouths is, if you’re the kind of girl who likes to raise a little hell yourself - and have spent the last few years of your life either doing just that, or slaying - then life without a Hellmouth can get to be pretty boring.

Sure, there are perks - more time to party; less time scrubbing bloodstains and slime out of your favorite pairs of jeans. Less death-of-innocent-bystanders.

And Faith had to admit - not having had to avert an apocalypse in several months had been pretty nice. After having averted two, Faith just found apocalypses annoying.

But barring all that, Faith sort of missed the Hellmouth sometimes. Vamp-ass kicking just wasn’t what it used to be. There were very few around these days, and hardly any demons. And the vampires that did turn out, were less Big Bad than they were Big Bore. Most of them didn’t even talk while Faith was trying to kill them, and that really pissed her off. If she was going to drag her happy ass out of bed, and trudge all the way down to a nasty old cemetery just to kill something…then the least that something could do was make with the witty repartee while the obligatory killing commenced.

Something told Faith that tonight would be different when she arrived at cemetery numero cinco and felt this…this something prickling beneath her skin. It was the same kinda feeling Faith got when she came up against something new and really not fun to come up against. Or the first time Willow had gone all Red-Headed Witch of the West in front of her.

Then she saw them - the vampires. Her vampires, turning to dust right there, unslayed.

Or… Yeah. Slayed, obviously. But not by her. By some little brunette in jeans and a sweatshirt and a way big muumuu. And she had a friend. Faith saw only the back of him - black clothing, blond…hair…

Faith shook her head. For a moment, she was reminded of… And she opened her mouth to speak. “Who the…”

That’s when the ground suddenly disappeared and everything went dark.

 

~+[]+~

 

Faith regained consciousness in a motel room. Or what might have been a motel room before someone went Giles all over the place. The room reeked of dusty old books like the ones the Watcher liked to pore over whenever he got the chance.

Of course, Giles’s books didn’t have as many teeth.

Literally.

Faith shook her head, then looked in the direction of what she groggily decided must be the sound of a dog chewing. It wasn’t a dog, but a book - trying to chew on her chair leg. Mostly it was just getting its pages all crinkled up, and making a lot of noise. But still…

Faith went to kick at the odd spectacle, and maybe cuss a little. How the hell did she end up in a motel room cum library a-la-Giles, and a chair-eating textbook? And, more importantly, would the book start in on her ankle after it had finished trying to maul her chair?

But then Faith realized she couldn’t cuss. She couldn’t kick. She couldn’t even open her mouth. She was frozen stiff; all she could move were her eyes, and those danced around the room now wildly. If Faith’s muscles hadn’t been entirely out of her control, they would have tensed like coiled springs. Surprises weren’t really Faith’s thing. And waking in a strange motel room, unable to move, with demonic reading material growling at her feet definitely fell under the category of Surprises With a Capital…

“Hey!”

A man’s voice captured Faith’s attention. British accent…just a little different than Giles’s or Wesley’s or Spike’s.

Then a black boot entered Faith’s line of sight, kicking the book gnawing on the chair leg beneath her across the room and under a bed. The book squealed as it skidded along the floor and thudded against a wall, unseen. Faith followed the boot with her eyes, until they set upon the face of the boot’s owner.

“Pesky bugger. Didn’t mean to leave you alone with Granger’s little guinea pig. Forgot it was here, honestly. We just went to grab a bite to eat. Pity about those boots. Muggle-made, are they?”

‘Nice,’ Faith thought. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting when she’d looked up, but it wasn’t this stranger - with a nice body hidden beneath expensive clothes, and unusual features (delicate and sharp at the same time), and those strange, grey eyes. Faith wasn’t so surprised she didn’t recognize a good-looking guy when she saw one.

Of course, she wasn’t so hard-up she minded kicking said hottie’s hot little ass, either.

And would have said so, if her lips weren’t so damned useless all of a sudden.

Whatever. Faith let her angry eyes speak for her. And nearly went dizzy with rage when the blond just arched a brow at her expression, then stretched out on one of the room’s beds, with his ankles crossed and his hands behind his head.

“Malfoy, enough with the boots already,” came a feminine voice from just outside Faith’s vision, as Faith noticed for the first time the scuff marks on her new Docs.

Okay. That settled it. She was kicking blondie’s ass, and the demonic book, all the way from here to the next Hellmouth.

“And that better not have been you kicking my book I just heard. It’s testy enough as it is. There’s no telling what it’ll get up to now if you’ve abused it.”

Then Malfoy’s companion - the girl Faith had seen in the cemetery - came into view, carrying two large plastic bags of what smelled like Chinese. Up close, Faith saw that the “girl” was a little older than she’d looked from far off - maybe Faith’s age. She had shoulder-length auburn hair and brown eyes, and that slightly pinched expression Faith had only seen before on a Watcher. Or two.

“Oh!” The girl said suddenly, blinking as she took a look at Faith, startled. “You’re awake!”

Malfoy snorted before Faith could think to try. “Well, of course she’s awake, Granger. Did you think I was talking to her in her sleep?”

Granger didn’t strike Faith as the type to give as good as she got, but she turned to the blond with a look on her face that suggested this sort of thing happened between the two of them all the time.

“What? You can bathe a woman in her sleep, but not make inane conversation to her?” Granger glared at her companion and pulled a skinny little stake out of her muumuu.

Faith was torn between amusement and concern. That was one wimpy ass stake... But Faith couldn’t scratch her nose right now, much less take on muumuu girl and her twig, whatever she planned on doing with it.

Which blondie obviously took issue with, seeing as he was off the bed and at Granger’s side, holding the hand that held her stick in one of his, before even Faith had seen him move.

‘Very nice,’ Faith thought. Maybe tonight would be un-boring for a change.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks: to Methaya for letting me know I was being naughty in Chapter 6 without knowing it.
> 
> Apologies: to any German-speaking readers who read the last chapter and probably now think I am a great, big pervert :D I might sorta be one. But I like my perversion to be the result of a conscious effort, usually, so… Yeah.

Hermione wasn’t vain when it came to her intellectual prowess, regardless of what some of her past acquaintances might say. She did, however, maintain certain expectations where her performance as an Auror and as a researcher for the Ministry of Magic were concerned.

That is to say, when Hermione made a decision, she expected it to be the right one. Always. She never acted upon her decisions rashly, and was always careful to keep an open mind when making important choices, so this should not have been a difficult goal to achieve. And yet, every now and then, Hermione chose _wrong_.

“Wrong” as in _‘That Gilderoy Lockhart is such a great professor!’_ Wrong as in _‘I’m sure Ernie’s much less a prat outside of school. I’ll date him.’_

The kind of wrong that ended with Hermione sitting atop a bound Slayer and looking like she’d just battled a Troll. Malfoy sat nearby, on the floor with his back to the motel room’s door. The motel manager had been yelling from the other side of it before Malfoy had cast an obliviate at him through the room’s now broken window.

Malfoy sported a nasty looking bump over one temple and a bloody nose. Hermione could hardly understand him when he spoke - the _Break-Away Broken Nose Balm_ he‘d just applied not quite having gone into effect.

“O, dob be silly, Mowfoy. Wha’s se goin to do? Ruh away? We’b warded te door,” Malfoy grumbled from beneath the scrap of ruined curtain he was using to staunch the bloodflow from his nose. “Se din ruh away, Grager. I gib you dat.”

No, the Slayer most certainly had not run away. And, to be honest, Hermione hadn’t even considered the possibility that they’d face an alternative problem with her once they’d removed her from her body bind. Hermione had only agreed to putting her in one in the first place to simplify the process of getting her back to their motel room. Hermione knew all about Slayers, of course - she realized that they could be very aggressive and didn’t trust easily. But surely a woman who had been fighting demons and vampires since she was a teenager, sans magic, would have to be patient and rational, as well? Hermione hadn’t thought the woman would attack the second she’d regained the power to blink, much less knock Hermione across the room and pin Malfoy to the wall.

Malfoy had insisted that she would. “It’s what I would do,” he’d rationalized at the time.

Hermione hadn’t listened. And she got the feeling she’d be hearing about it now for the rest of her days.

“Nope, I’m still here,” the Slayer said, glaring up at Hermione from the floor. Hermione had put another bind on her, this time casting just at her shoulders and below, so that they could talk with her. Granted, that might take a little work. All Hermione had heard coming out of the Slayer’s mouth thus far had been a variety of colorful curses and threats so imaginative they had piqued Draco’s interest. “And you’re cute and all…” Faith continued. “But if I’d wanted a lap dance, I probably would have let Blond and Sniffly over there do the honors.”

Hermione - already flushed from their unexpected confrontation - turned an even brighter pink at the Slayer’s comment and unstraddled her slowly. She half expected the bind she’d cast to miraculously fail, and for the woman to jump up and try to thrash them again.

Malfoy had still been muttering under his breath, his words more clear now when they were loud enough to make out. Hermione made a mental note to ask what he’d added to the Balm he used to make it work so quickly.

“You know, under other circumstances I might have enjoyed that,” Malfoy was saying as he stood, tossing the bloodied bit of curtain in his hand in the wastebasket by the bureau. Ironically, it was perhaps the only bit of furniture left standing as it had been before Hermione had unleashed the Slayer upon everything around them. “But now I’m thinking…”

Malfoy withdrew his wand, his eyes locked with those of the Slayer. With a swish and flick a vial had removed itself from the potions chest he’d left sitting open on the now lopsided table in the corner. The vial flew into Malfoy’s hand, and he wiggled it at the Slayer.

“…let’s get this over with, so we can pay a little visit to that Watcher’s Council of yours and see what they have to say about the situation.”

Hermione threw him a measuring look. Draco might be bluffing, but then again - despite their orders - he might not. The Slayer had broken his nose. Getting bested by a girl had never sat well with Malfoy - Hermione should know. She’d bested him in their classes at Hogwarts for years, and she’d even slapped him in the face in their fourth year. Two years later, Malfoy had still been angry enough about it to hex the joints out of Hermione fingers. Ron had retaliated by giving Malfoy a concussion, and both boys had gotten their prefects’ status temporarily revoked a week later - for busting one another’s kneecaps in the midst of an after-hours duel.

“The Watcher’s Council, huh?” the Slayer said from her spot on the floor. She looked unperturbed by the wand in Malfoy’s right hand, although she’d seen what it could do, and the Veritaserum in his left; for all she knew, they could be about to feed her poison. If anything, the Slayer just looked angrier than she had when their little skirmish had begun - a fact which made Hermione’s hair stand on end. And she obviously found Malfoy’s mention of the Watcher’s Council darkly amusing, although Hermione wasn’t to know why until she said: “Figures. If you’re talking WC, the new and improved, I’m thinking the G-man’ll back me up. If it’s old school Watching you’re looking for, you’re sorta out of luck. That Watcher’s Council went boom about a year ago.”

Hermione blinked.

“Pardon me?” Draco asked.

“Boom,” said the Slayer, patronizingly. “As in their sneaky, British asses needed kicking, and someone gave it to them good. The new crew set up shop in Cleveland after B shut down the Hellmouth.”

She could very well have been speaking a different language, but Hermione and Malfoy got the gist of what she’d said.

Malfoy hesitated, and then threw up his hands.

“Well. You wouldn’t happen to have a manual that tells us what to do about _that_ , do you, Granger?”

Dazed, Hermione glanced around them at the piles of disheveled books that littered the room. Her Goblin psyche text, sadly, had not survived the Slayer’s wrath so well as Malfoy and Hermione herself. It was now a smoldering stain on a patch of carpet in the corner.

“Bloody hell,” Hermione whispered.

She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

 

~+[]+~

 

“Well, it isn’t like we’ve misplaced them, Justin…”

The second time they needed to use the telephone, Hermione made the call.

Actually, she made two of them. One to the dispatch in their department, to leave a message, and one on the Emergency Communications line. The latter was going about as well as Draco might have expected.

“No, I don’t see how that… Of course! But…No! I can‘t wa…”

Hermione was pacing about their side of the room - opposite the one that held a partially-bound Slayer sitting in the corner, glaring darkly at the wall. She was having another of those frantic moments that had led her, before, to make strange gestures out the car window, and plow their Volvo into a road-side ditch.

Hermione sighed as she was put on hold, the sound containing much less anger than something else for Draco’s comfort.

Draco didn’t even think as he did it - clutched Hermione’s wrist on her seventh pass by him. His thumb lightly brushed over the pulse point there, bringing Hermione as effectively to a halt as if he’d grabbed her and ordered her to stop. It was just something Draco had done when he was younger, whenever Lucius was away on “business”. Draco’s mother would work herself into (what constituted, for her) an outright panic, waiting for news of Draco’s father, and Draco would calm her down with a touch - to her shoulder, her hand. He’d never been good with the sort of words that would have served the same purpose, so he’d stopped trying to give them.

Now he wasn’t sure what had sparked such a reaction from him. Draco had never felt the need to console someone outside his mother and the small circle of friends he considered family.

And Hermione was obviously as shocked by Draco’s behavior as he felt. She stopped in front of him, where he sat on the corner of the motel room’s dresser, eyes wide, and just blinked at him. Draco heard Finch-Fletchley talking on the other end of the telephone line before she did.

Then Hermione snapped to, with an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Draco half expected her to snatch her hand away, and wasn’t sure what to do when she didn’t. He waited until she was involved in conversation again to withdraw his own hand and make the issue a moot point.

“Yes? Oh, yes, I’m still here,” Hermione was saying. “What?” She began to pace again. “But… Yes, yes, I do realize that…” There was a pause, and then a displeased sigh that Draco would not want to have been the recipient of. “ _Fine_! Yes, we’ll wait for the call back!”

Hermione slammed down the phone receiver with much more force than was necessary.

“They’re taking the news that well, are they?” Draco innocently asked.

“You’d think we’d bloody well been _trying_ to make the Ministry look bad. Honestly! As if they can blame us for making a Hellmouth and the Watcher’s Council disappear!”

Actually, the Ministry couldn’t blame the two of them for this - or, more to the point, they couldn’t blame Draco. Draco seriously doubted Hermione would have found herself faced with any pointed fingers, even if the Ministry could have pointed one at her.

But, unfortunately, the Ministry could - and most likely would - try and blame the Aurory for all of this. Nevermind that the Aurors weren’t responsible for keeping track of Hellmouths - nor that they’d all been a bit busy, the past nine years, battling Death Eaters and dark lords, to be taking on extracurriculars. Cornelius Fudge was no longer Minister of Magic as he had been when Draco and Hermione were children, but the Ministry hadn’t changed so much since Fudge’s day that they were above passing the buck and letting others pay the price. And who better to take the fall, for the sake of PR, than the one department in all of Magical Britain that openly hired former Death Eaters and Slytherins as more than mail boys and secretaries?

“Hmm. Beaurocracy’s a bitch all over. There’s a shocker.” Hermione looked almost surprised at the reminder that the Slayer was in the room with them. She and Draco looked over at the woman as she cocked an eyebrow at them. “And fun as it’s been, sitting here on my ass, listening to you two get all angry and British… If you’re gonna keep me here much longer, you could at least make with some of that grub you got ‘round here somewhere. Girl’s gotta eat.”

Draco and Hermione exchanged a look. The Chinese Hermione had brought in with them earlier was not in plain sight - and was most likely unsalvageable, wherever it had ended up in the wreckage of their motel room.

“Right. I’ll just grab my cloak.”

Hermione grabbed her cloak and her coin purse, half-conscious of her own movements. Her mind was still obviously on her conversation with Finch-Fletchley. She cast a wary glance in the Slayer’s direction, and a questioning one at Draco, but Draco waved her on with a look of his own.

When Hermione had gone, silence settled over the room anew.

“So…” Draco began, shifting into a more comfortable position on top of the dresser. He decided conversation was as good a way to pass the time til Hermione returned as any. “Inhumanly strong and charming, as well. How’s that working out for you?”

The Slayer gave him a look that made the use of her fingers unnecessary.

Draco shrugged.

“Or we could just sit here and glare at each other some more. That’s good, too.”

The Slayer snorted and rolled her eyes.

 

~+[]+~

 

“Okay, okay, okay… Let’s just pretend you didn’t lose me back at the sweet and sour chicken.”

Hermione, Draco, and the Slayer - Faith, she said her name was, making Hermione wish, for not the first time, that she’d studied current events in the Watcher’s Council before she and Draco had first gone out - were sitting around the motel room’s lopsided table. Faith had been relatively behaved (i.e. nonviolent) so Draco had removed her partial bodybind. This arrangement worked for all of them, as Faith didn’t seem the type to sit there and be fed, and Hermione would have been awkward helping feed her, after the straddling incident of earlier.

Malfoy, no doubt, would not have been awkward at all. But Hermione was strangely reluctant to watch Malfoy help the Slayer with the Chinese Hermione had bought to replace their first order.

This order was more than twice as big as the last one. Hermione hadn’t known what the Slayer might eat, and she’d been too flustered and preoccupied, at the time, to give it much thought - so she’d ordered a little bit of everything on the Chinese restaurant’s menu.

Still, the Slayer had already made her way through two helpings of chicken, much of the mushu pork, and half of the noodles. She was now working on the rice and egg rolls, while Hermione watched in fascination, and Draco fought Faith for the last of the shrimp and dumplings.

“I mean, what’s the big deal. So you didn’t know the Hellmouth went bye-bye. Now you do. What are you gonna do? Track down everybody who doesn‘t know how to pick up a phone and tell their mommies?”

Faith spoke around a mouthful of rice and then slurped down a couple of long noodles.

Hermione tried to stay focused on their conversation. She’d only ever seen Seamus Finnigan eat like that.

Draco scoffed at the mention of a telephone, still sore at his failures in using the ECS.

“It isn’t really about the Hellmouth. It’s politics, partly. The Ministry’s been hoping to strengthen its relations with the other Magical communities for some time now. And this doesn’t make our chances for doing that look good.”

Not good at all. Hermione knew that Minister McGurren had been planning on a series of good-will gestures towards the Conference, in a show of appreciation for their limited support throughout The War with Voldemort. And in an attempt at forging ties that would ensure more than limited support from Magical America in the future. Having his similar intentions towards the Council nullified by the Council’s silence on the matter of the closed Hellmouth (or, if what Faith said was true, by the destruction of the Council) would no doubt discourage the Minister personally. But if the Conference knew about what had happened with the Council, and had chosen not to alert the Ministry… Or if, worse, the Conference hadn’t known about it either…

“Then there’s the little issue of a Hellmouth having closed without anyone at the Ministry having noticed,” Draco contributed. While Faith attacked her meal with gusto, and Hermione picked at hers, Draco ate in proper-sized portions, holding his chopsticks with perfect ease and poise. Faith had tossed hers aside when Hermione had handed them to her. “It isn’t like the Ministry should have to be told these sorts of things. Closing a Hellmouth is no small feat. There should have been buzz about it all the way across the Atlantic. But there was nothing.”

This was the first time Hermione had ever seen Draco speak so openly with someone about which he knew so little. Actually, until recently, Hermione had rarely seen Draco speak openly. As they had been giving Faith the explanations she’d asked for, Draco’s sudden loquaciousness had begun to nettle Hermione, although she wasn’t sure why.

Then she’d realized. Draco was as nervous about the recent developments as she was. She’d seen it before - how casual Draco behaved under pressure. He didn’t flitter around the room, as Hermione sometimes did, or become so lost in thought he nearly ended up buying an entire buffet bar. He strutted, and snarked, and showed off just as he always did. But if you watched him closely, he held himself unusually still; his eyes never mimicked his mouth when he smirked. And he spoke with the straightforwardness of someone aware that something “bad” was coming, and that soon it might not matter what anyone said in the meantime.

“We need to know as much about what happened as possible,” Hermione explained, taking up where Draco left off. “So that, if there are…outside forces…affecting our communications with the other communities, they can be dealt with before something unfortunate happens.”

Such as an entire Watcher’s Council getting itself blown up, without (supposedly) anyone to come to their survivors’ aide. Hermione was just beginning to think of what Faith had told them in terms of what it meant for the Council members, and she balked at her own short-sightedness, not having thought of it sooner. All those lives lost, that - perhaps? - could have been prevented. And the families of the Watchers that had died…

…the men and women who’d lost their spouses; their lovers. The children who’d lost their parents…

“Cool. So make a trip to Cleveland. I’m sure Giles can give you the 411. Me, I was just there for the slayage. Not the person to talk to about politics.”

Hermione nodded. She’d told Justin everything Faith had told them - about the closing of the Hellmouth, and about where Mr. Giles and his Slayer could be located. As it turns out, Faith was not the Slayer Hermione and Draco had come to America to find. Hermione still thought of her as the Slayer, although - really - a Buffy Summers was reported to be the Council’s Chosen One. Faith, and a number of younger girls, as well, had all been activated through a series of strange events - the retelling of which had given Hermione just one more reason to stir the soup in her hands without actually sipping much of it.

“No hard feelings, then?” Draco asked.

Faith shrugged. She and Draco seemed to have come to some sort of understanding while Hermione was out at the restaurant. Hermione could not imagine how.

“Eh. I made you bleed, you fed me. Gave me boots.” Faith grinned, wiggling her feet, which were propped up on the sloping side of their table. Draco had given her a pair of vintage army boots to replace the Doc Martens Hermione’s book had damaged. “We’re cool,” Faith said.

“Excellent. Because I’m exhausted,” Draco said, dropping his chopsticks into one of the empty paper containers littering the tabletop.

Hermione silently agreed. But wondered if she would get any sleep tonight. Or - technically - this morning. They were supposed to get a final call back at eight a.m., telling them what they were to do next, or if they were simply to return to the Ministry.

The Slayer stood and stretched, arms held high above her head and back arched like a cat’s.

“Well. Am I good to go, or what? ‘Coz I get kinda cranky when I have to sleep in a chair.” She cast a meaningful glance at the chair Hermione and Draco had put her in while she’d been in her bodybind.

“Yes. Yes, of course,” Hermione agreed, standing, as well. It wasn’t as though she could do anything to stop her, if Faith decided at that moment that she wanted to leave. She had made Hermione and Draco place their wands on the opposite side of the room before unbinding her, to prove that they meant her no harm.

“You’re playing us, aren’t you?” Draco had said.

Faith had just smiled. “Depends. Are you gonna let me?”

Neither of them had mentioned that Draco could cast a summoning spell wandless. Or that Hermione carried a spare wand. The spare wasn’t very accessible, and so wouldn’t pose a threat to the Slayer if she tried to flee, anyway.

“Then it’s been real. But I’ve gotta catch some zees. You crazy kids have fun in Cleveland. Give B my best.”

Hermione and Draco took Faith’s last words to them with as much aplomb as they had her first, at least knowing this time what - or rather, who - the B referred to.

When Faith left, Hermione felt a number of conflicting emotions. Uncertainty, as perhaps they shouldn’t have let the Slayer out of their sight so quickly - they couldn’t even verify any of her stories; disappointment because Hermione had been in the presence of a Slayer. And the experience had not been as educational as Hermione might have hoped, except in the most surprising ways.

And, finally, Hermione felt relief. She’d been on edge with the Slayer there. When it was just she and Draco again (and didn’t that seem strange, to think of it that way) Hermione felt as though she could let down a bit of her guard, and speak more freely.

Then she turned to see what had captured Draco’s attention about as soon as they had said their goodbyes to Faith.

He was looking at one of the motel room’s beds. The motel room’s bed, as the broken frame and ruined mattress nearly blocking the entrance to the bathroom resembled a proper bed no longer.

Hermione couldn’t dredge up a response to Draco’s querying gaze.

This was just the perfect end to her eveni-… To her early morning.

“Flip you for it?” Draco offered.

Hermione sighed.

“Get some sleep, Malfoy,” she said, and lay down on the left side of the bed.

 

~+[]+~

 

As soon as Faith left the motel room, she found a payphone. She dialled in a number she’d only used once since it had been activated.

“Come on, B,” she mumbled to herself, as she listened to the phone ringing. “You are so gonna wanna hear this.”

 

~+[]+~

 

As sure as Hermione had been, before, that she would get no sleep in light of the Hellmouth issue, when she rose from her pillow - later - she couldn’t remember having lain her head upon it.

Oddly, she did remember why Draco had been lying on the bed next to her. So when she turned - to find the right side of the mattress warm from having been slept on, the sheets slightly ruffled - she wasn’t startled.

However, she was surprised that Draco was up and out of bed.

And then she heard him.

He was on the telephone. And laughing. It was not a pleasant laugh. It was more the type of chuckle Malfoy gave people to emphasize how not funny they were being.

“Oh, really. And are you going to tell her that?”

Draco was standing with his back to the bed, so he hadn’t seen that Hermione was awake yet. For that matter, Hermione had just seen him. He must have been in the middle of dressing when the call had come - assuming he hadn’t figured out how to place a call on his own. Hermione wondered how the phone’s ringing hadn’t woken her up.

Then she wondered if she had woken up. Seeing Malfoy shirtless in the morning was not an experience she associated with the waking world.

And she hadn’t known that Malfoy had a tattoo like that. During The War, the Order had begun memorizing the Death Eater’s descriptions and distinguishing features - fearing Voldemort had developed a way to hide the Dark Mark. Hermione herself had contributed in creating a spell that could cut through glamours, using non-Magical identifying marks alone.

Hermione realized she was staring at Draco’s shoulder blades when he turned and saw that she was no longer sleeping.

She would have said something, or expected Draco to hand her the phone, but she had no idea what to say. And, after a moment, Draco seemed to decide on something, and went back to his conversation.

“Fine. But you tell the Director he owes me a bloody big raise for this.” Draco hung up the phone.

“And what was that about?” Hermione asked with a dry mouth, finding her voice at last. She kept her eyes resolutely on Draco’s face.

Draco had one brow raised, and was pulling on another button-up shirt.

“Looks like we’ll be taking a little detour to Los Angeles.”

Hermione kicked back the covers she’d been snuggled under, and stood - only momentarily distracted by the discovery that she’d gotten out of her robes and boots, before getting into bed, without realizing it.

“What are we to do in Los Angeles?” she asked.

Hermione couldn’t read Draco’s expression.

“Play house, apparently,” he said. And then, before she could comment on that: “Smith says he thinks they may have found out who’s been shielding us from picking up on the fluctuations in mystical energy that have been taking place over here.”

The way Draco said that didn’t bode well with Hermione.

“And?”

“I don’t suppose your Muggle Studies course covered a firm called Wolfram and Hart,” Draco replied, in way of an answer.

 

~+[]+~

 

Meanwhile…

 

The perception of Muggle Britain as being mired in tradition and old-world sentiment had long been prevalent by the time the current Minister of Magic had taken office.

Not that anyone on the non-Muggle side of London could have said anything about it, one way or the other. There weren’t a lot of wizards in the Ministry who knew enough about Muggle pop culture to have formed such an opinion. And the Ministry, itself, had been about as “old-world” as any Magical institution in existence.

But _after_ Phineas McGurren became Minister of Magic…

“Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Auror’s Division 315, how may I direct your talk?”

Akilina Kirke leaned back in her chair, at the receptionist’s desk of 315, twirling her quill where it levitated above a stack of steno pads and parchment rolls.

She hardly glanced at the wizard whose face appeared in the flames of the miniature fireplace mounted in the corner of her cubicle.

“Yes, I need to speak to Auror Davies, on the f-”

“Fourth floor, office 26B,” Akilina recited the room number mechanically. She paused in her twirling, and set down her issue of The Enquisitor, long enough to study the gyrating spheres resting atop the fireplace’s narrow mantle. Each of them were silent. The one on the left glowed a mellow gold - the other two shifted from purple to green and back again. The twirling resumed.

“Please hold.” Akilina reached into one of the jars sitting in a rack by her desk, and drew out a pinch of bright pink powder to throw into the fireplace. The wizard’s face disappeared, replaced almost immediately by another.

“Department of Magical Law Enforcement-”

One of the spheres shrilled. Akilina looked up at it sharply, lowering her tabloid. All of the spheres were glowing an angry orange, with streaks of brown and blue. Akilina blinked and turned to the wizard in the fireplace.

She smiled, widely. “Auror’s Division 315,” she cooed. The wizard was oblivious to the aura-reading apparatus’ response. “How may I direct your talk?”

Akilina screwed off the top of the black jar resting on her powder rack, and reached for the dark red powder inside.

The wizard smiled pleasantly. “Auror Ambrose, please. Second floor, office 13C.”

“Right away,” Akilina replied, drawing out a pinch of the red powder. It crackled between her fingers…

Then fell back into the jar, as a man’s hand wrapped around Akilina’s wrist and she let the powder fall.

Akilina turned, ready to hex whoever had dared lay a hand on her, on work-hours or off - then stopped when she saw Harry Potter standing in front of her desk, one brow raised and with his arms now crossed over his chest.

“If you fry another of those,” he said smoothly. “We’ll never get the smell out of the lobby.”

Akilina, for the moment, was placated.

She crossed her arms, in a mimicry of the auror, and shrugged.

“I don’t mind the smell of burnt Death Eater. Do you?”

Potter simply looked at her.

“Oh, alright. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”

She turned back to the wizard waiting to be connected to Auror Ambrose’s office, and threw a pinch of gold powder into the fireplace, rather than the dark red. “It’ll be just a moment, sir. Please hold.”

The wizard’s face disappeared from Akilina’s flames, but the spheres on her fireplace’s mantle blinked in confirmation that the silent alarm had been tripped. The wizard would shortly be getting a surprise visit, and it wouldn’t be from Amanda Ambrose.

Akilina spun in her chair and plucked her quill out of the air.

“So. Potter. Did you need something? Or did you come down here _just_ to stop me from reaching this month’s quota?”

Akilina’s smile was overly warm, and showed a lot of teeth, and caused Potter to roll his eyes as he seated himself on one corner of Akilina’s desk.

“The Ministry doesn’t pay us to blow people up, Kirke,” Potter replied, rifling through the memos in Akilina’s outbox. Many of the missives had been waiting for days for her signature, and a distribution spell, so they jittered within the box restlessly. Potter fished out three memos addressed to himself, receiving a nasty paper cut as one purchase order - anxious to make it’s way down to filing - tried latching onto his index finger and failed. Potter frowned at Akilina in irritation, as Akilina ignored him and he sucked on his wounded digit.

“Well, they should. Would liven things up a bit around here. Besides, who foiled that assassination attempt on the HDIMC last month?”

Potter didn’t blink. He gathered his memos in one hand, and the diet soda he’d put down (to stop Akilina from sautéing that wizard) with the other.

“Neville and Padma did. After they finished scraping enough Death Eater out of their eyes to chase down the two who sneaked in through the back.”

Akilina narrowed her eyes, but returned to her Enquisitor and let the rebuttal go. “Way to flatter a girl’s ego, Potter. Keep that up and you’ll never get into my pants.”

Potter ignored the vulgarity. He headed for the lobby’s bay of elevators shaking his head at the Slytherin.

“Oi. And, Potter?”

Potter turned just as Akilina sent another message sailing his way. This one was written on a post-it note, rather than parchment, so it not so much “sailed” as somersaulted towards him - in that lazy way that post-it notes liked to somersault. The message had to be from one of the witches operating the department’s phone lines.

Potter plucked it out of the air when it neared him, and he read it, his expression darkening as he did.

Akilina smiled. “You’ve got a call from the States,” she said sweetly, as the face of an elderly witch appeared in her fireplace.

“Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Auror’s Division 315. Just a moment, Mrs. Perks, and I’ll connect you.”

Potter entered the first elevator to arrive at the lobby, forcing his way through the small crowd of people coming off it, and quickly pushed in the number to take him to his office.

 

~+[]+~

 

The next day, Wolfram & Hart’s doors opened bright and early, just as they always did. The lobby was filled with the usual hustle and bustle of a demonically owned law firm/multi-billion dollar cooperation.

The executive boardroom was filled with the firm’s most important department heads.

Plus one newly recorporealized, soulled vampire.

“I’m just not sure we can trust him,” Angel was saying.

“I’m certain we can’t,” Wesley told him. “But I’m not certain how long we can hold him if we don’t give him a reason to work with us.”

“And why do we want him working with us, again?” Gunn asked. Fred smiled at the sentiment, but Lorne responded with a “Here, here.”

Spike paused in tapping out a rendition of _Heaven Beside Me_ , on the top of the conference table with Angel’s executive pen, long enough to put in his two-cents’ worth.

“Well you don’t think ‘ol Tattoo Boy’s stayed alive this long by being stupid, do ya? Seems to me you could make good use of a chap with his knack for pissing off higher powers. Seeing as you lot’ve got even more mortal enemies than he has.”

Angel snatched the pen out of Spike’s hand before he could start tapping with it again. Spike stuck his tongue out at him.

The others either pretended not to see, or not to be amused.

Angel indulged in one of his why-is-he-still-here sighs, and leaned back in his chair.

“Okay. Fine. Can we at least remove the tattoos, so it will be easier to keep him here?”

It was Wes, Fred, and Gunn’s turn to shift in their seats and sigh. They’d already been over this issue. Twice.

“Not unless we want the Senior Partners to find him and send him to Hell…” Wes replied, in a patient voice which - coming from Wes - wasn’t really patient at all. It was cautionary.

Angel snorted. He threw up his hands in mock horror. “Oh, no! Not that,” he quipped. Fred giggled.

Wes gave Angel a stern look. “…which would make it impossible for him to help us take them down. And would completely defeat the purpose of our having kept him here, rather than let him leave LA again.”

“To cause who knows how much more trouble,” Angel muttered. He didn’t notice, but Wes and Fred looked up, and Lorne turned, as the conference room door opened and Harmony slipped in, with an apologetic wave.

“He’d be working strictly in an advisory capacity,” Gunn was saying. “Contract employee. He wouldn’t, technically, even be part of the firm. He’d answer to you.”

“Excuse me,” Lorne said - cutting off Harmony, who had just opened her mouth to speak.

“Uh, Boss-”

“But isn’t this the guy who wants to kill you? So badly he got himself all painted up just to come back here and unleash some big nasty in the basement?”

Wes and Gunn exchanged a glance.

“He won’t like it,” Wes admitted.

“But if the choice is between working for you and Hell…” Gunn began.

“I’d chose Hell,” Spike said, cheerily, earning him another of Angel’s glares.

Gunn coughed to hide a snicker.

“Um… Boss?”

Angel didn’t look up, assuming Harmony had brought him the mug of blood he’d ordered.

“Just set it on the table, Harmony,” he said, shuffling through some of his papers.

He set them back down again. “I’m tired of talking about this. Where are we with the Haklaar case?”

Fred piped up, as Harmony lingered in the background, looking uncertainly at Angel, and then through the doorway behind her.

“I’ve, uh, finished testing those sonar-resistant tracking devices you wanted. They’re good to go. We can have them in place in a day.”

Angel nodded, glad for once that something seemed to be going right.

Angel looked at Wes and Wes also nodded.

“Do it,” Angel said. Fred scribbled a little note on her palm pilot.

“Boss…”

“Those trade negotiations with the Ga’Rod are going to take a while, though,” Gunn reported. “I’m supposed to meet their Shaide this evening. Would help if I had a little something to bring with me to sweeten the deal.”

“We aren’t going to give them anyone’s firstborn, Gunn.”

“That goes without saying. But real estate’s got some empty property up in the Hills. The Ga’Rod have been looking for a new breeding ground for a while, so-”

“Boss.”

Angel and the others looked up at Harmony’s uncharacteristic outburst.

Harmony looked startled by it, too. “Oh. Sorry,” she said. Then stood there.

“Harmony,” Angel finally asked. “What is it?”

“Your ten a.m. is here,” Harmony told him, “and he’s-”

“Rather anxious to get started,” an unfamiliar voice spoke, as a young man walked into the room.

He was well-groomed and dressed in a dark, expensive suit. He had light eyes and white-blonde hair, and something about him made Angel sit up straight in his seat. Beside him, Spike had tensed, as well.

“I hear you buy babies,” the man said, with a smile.

 

~+[]+~

 

Hermione took the news of their assignment even better than Draco had expected.

Which is to say, she spit orange juice all over him, as they sat in the horrifyingly Muggle diner where they were forced to breakfast before heading on to LA.

“Charming,” he drolled, grimacing, as he wiped at his face with a napkin.

Hermione was too preoccupied to apologize, as - certainly? - she would have done had he not just informed her that their employers were absolutely daft.

“What?”

“The spitting, Granger. I appreciate a good aim as well as the next wizard, but-”

“No.” Hermione looked like she was going to start stuttering. Draco put a protective hand over the top of her juice glass and slowly drew it away from her. Despite her momentary panic, Hermione noticed the gesture, and a corner of her lip quirked. She took a deep breath, and then another.

“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching out suddenly, and wiping away the drop of orange juice Draco had missed on his cheek. Draco blinked at the urge to lean into her touch.

“Why do they want us to do this?”

Draco poked at the bacon left on his plate. Eating hadn’t been such a chore that morning. He’d been tired enough and hungry enough not to care what he ate. Plus, he’d spent quite a few summers in the Orient. The Wizarding food over there tasted just the same as the Muggle. Not that some Californian, 24-hour buffet could match the culinary offerings of the restaurants he’d frequented, but…

Nevertheless, eating was an entirely different experience with a few hours of sleep behind him. And the food sitting in front of Draco was not only undeniably Muggle, it was American. And probably not a shining example of that, either.

“Last night,” Draco explained, “a clerk from the Department of Fiscal Grievances contacted the Aurory. Gringotts’s filed a suit against a sect of demons who’ve fallen behind on repaying a loan they took out with the bank in London.”

Hermione nodded her head, listening.

“The sect has relocated in Los Angeles,” Draco continued. “The loan furnished the lavish preparations the sect has made for a human child.”

Here Draco was getting to the good part. Hermione blinked.

“The demon sect wants to raise a human child?” she asked.

Draco raised a brow. “They want to _ritually sacrifice_ a human child. But they have to raise it first. The ritual requires thirteen years of precise preparation.”

Hermione’s face contorted cutely. “Ew. My God, the Ministry isn’t going to _let_ them, are they?”

“No. Not that the Fell Brethren know this.“ On Hermione’s lack of recognition at the name, Draco supplied: “That’s what the sect members call themselves.” Draco shook his head. He would never understand the compulsion of evil organizations to give themselves names - even after having belonged to one. To Draco’s way of thinking, if you were truly evil, you shouldn’t care what the newspapers called you when they reported the atrocities you’d committed. “The Ministry’s intercepted the suit,” he went on. “They want more information on the firm that will be providing the Fell Brethren their sacrifice, before they move on the Brethren themselves.”

“Wolfram and Hart,” Hermione guessed.

Draco smiled mirthlessly. “Yes. And when the Ministry looked into who’s running the firm these days, guess what they found.”

Hermione leaned back in her seat. Her expression was becoming less anxious, and more grim.

“He or she has a connection to Sunnydale,” she guessed right again.

Draco slid Hermione’s juice glass back beside her plate. She looked like she might need a drink very soon, and that was the only drink available.

“He lived there for a time. Tried to end the world there once. And he has a…personal…connection to the Slayer Mr. Giles is responsible for.” Draco shrugged. “Or at least he had. Smith said he’d need more time to get anything more current on him.” Draco rolled his eyes. As Hermione seemed to consider the prat a friend, Draco would refrain from commenting on what he thought about Smith’s “needs”.

Hermione was frowning, her mind no doubt taking the same turns Draco’s had as Smith had given him this news - although Hermione’s seemed to be taking them faster.

“A personal connection to the Slayer, Buffy Summers. And Rupert Giles…”

“Her Watcher,” Draco finished the sentence for her. “Who is, reportedly, in charge of the new Watcher’s Council, knew all about it.”

Hermione looked pale. Draco cast a glance around the diner. There was only one other customer - a sleepy-looking truck driver, who was very nearly lying in the bowl of oatmeal sitting in front of him at the counter. And a bored-looking waitress, chewing gum and reading a magazine. The cook Draco had seen working in the kitchen wasn’t in view from Draco and Hermione’s table. Still, Draco thought he’d better wait until he and Hermione were alone before he told her the worst of what he had to say. The second-worst, perhaps she could handle.

“And-”

“ _And_?” Hermione repeated, unhappily.

Draco pulled a Muggle bill out of his pocket, trying and failing - again - to remember whether the amount was appropriate in this instance. But not caring. Hermione, likewise, paid the bill no mind.

“Wolfram and Heart has an ex-Watcher working for them,” Draco said. “Their CEO knew him before either of them were offered positions. Seems he was involved in the incident that lost the man his job with the Council. Need I prompt you to guess where the Watcher was stationed at the time?”

Hermione sighed, standing when Draco stood, and following him out of the diner. Neither glanced in the waitress’s direction when she called out a goodbye.

“Sunnydale,” Hermione answered. “And why do I get the feelings there’s more?”

Draco steered Hermione towards the rental car still in their possession. They’d patched it up with enough magic to get them to the motel after their accident, and to get them to the bus station now. After that, they’d leave the car in a parking lot and let the Ministry send someone to deal with it, and their hastily Reparo-ed motel room.

As no one seemed to be standing around to see, Draco opened Hermione’s door for her, but simply slipped into the driver’s seat himself. Rather than taking the time to conjure another driver’s side door, Hermione had just cast a glamour on the car to make it look as though it had one. And so that it didn’t look as though it had spent some time, recently, sitting in a ditch.

Draco put the car’s key in its ignition, hoping he could fake having more experience with driving than he actually had. That Hermione was sitting in the passenger’s seat right now, having let Draco take the Volvo’s keys from her without objection, was a testament to her state of mind. Draco didn’t want her driving, and he didn’t want his driving to upset her any further.

“Did Wood ever tell you which vampire Quirrell used to make his students write a parchment on as part of their DADA finals?” Draco asked, figuring that was as good a way to start the second half of this bad-news-breaking as any.

 

~+[]+~

 

Even after the “why” of what they’d been asked to do had been settled, there was still the “what” to consider.

Half way to Los Angeles, Hermione had begun to calm down about the fact that the single most evil institution with ties in both the human and the demon worlds seemed to have some connection to the new Watcher’s Council - and, possibly, to the destruction of the old. And that the single most evil vampire in history was now, apparently, running said evil institution.

Then Draco had had to address, again, how they were supposed to infiltrate the firm, to confirm all of this for themselves.

Luckily there had been no bus passengers or bus drivers around to witness the ensuing debacle. Draco had taken one look at the bus they were to board that morning, and had refused to set one foot on it. Riding in an airplane had been bad enough, for all that Draco was impressed with the Muggles for having found a way to get themselves off the ground. Draco absolutely drew the line at submitting himself to the indignities of public transport.

Draco had driven himself and Hermione to the nearest car dealership, instead, and purchased the most expensive vehicle on the lot. Which, seeing as Sunnydale didn’t seem to be attracting the rich and powerful like magnets, meant something only slightly more stylish than the Volvo they’d gotten from the car rental. Draco decided it would do, and decided also that he was going to upgrade just as soon as they got to Los Angeles. When he’d told Smith that the Director would owe him for this jaunt, he’d meant it.

Hermione hadn’t seemed to mind. At the car dealership, she hadn’t tried to talk Draco out of his purchase. Not because she was too dazed to think clearly, as she had been when she and Draco had left the diner, but - presumably - because she was as willing to drown her sorrows in a shopping spree as he. Hermione didn’t much strike Draco as the shopping kind, but as she couldn’t fit enough books into the interior of a car to research her cares away, Draco’d figured she was making do.

“I don’t think we can do this,” Hermione said, after Draco had brought up some of the technical details of the plan the Ministry had given them.

Draco shrugged, aiming at appearing more casual than he actually felt. “Of course we can. New car; new wardrobe. Smith said he’d be sending a little care package to a Magic shop that’s on our way. We’ll pick it up; purchase a few other necessities while we’re at it, and get a decent room to stay in this time. Then we’ll do our jobs.”

Because, of course, it would be that simple.

“It’s not like we’ll be meeting another Dark Lord, Granger,” Draco told her.

No, they’d just be scheduling an appointment to see the former Scourge of Europe. Then they’d risk their lives on Hermione’s ability to lie in a vampire’s face, and Draco’s ability to keep the both of them from getting drained (or worse) should the ruse fall through. All so they could snoop around one of the most secure buildings, according to Smith, in America, to see if the vampire had any connection to what was going on with the Council and the Hellmouth. If there was a connection, then what Draco and Hermione found to report might very well start another war. If there wasn’t, then the both of them would be back at square one. With no leads as to what was going on across the Atlantic, or what they could do about it.

Hermione was sighing, deeply.

“Okay. So we’re going to pretend to be a couple of potential clients. If we’re going to hire an evil law firm for some purpose, then we must be evil ourselves. Are we going to-”

Draco went from smiling, slightly, at Hermione’s tone of voice - as she recovered her equilibrium at last and went into “Hermione-mode” (as Draco had heard Weasley refer to it several times) - to trying not to glance in the same direction as Hermione had, for the second the glance had lasted before Hermione had caught herself giving it.

“Keep this as true-to-life as possible? Yes,” Draco said, sparing a look at Hermione’s face when she’d finished fidgeting and being unnecessarily contrite. He drummed the fingers of his left hand against the steering wheel, then stopped as he took the exit they needed.

“Never say my family’s reputation never did anything for you, Granger. There are advantages to be had in ruling by fear and mistrust.” The way that Draco’s father had done - if one could call Lucius’s position in the various dealings he’d done on the side of his job with the Ministry “ruling”. Regardless, Draco knew Lucius had built quite a name for himself in the Dark - both within the Wizarding world and without. His dealings with demons had been kept as secret as all his crimes, save his involvement with Voldemort, but Draco knew he’d had them. For the most part, Draco didn’t think of them. Not even when he’d gotten in from Jerusalem and found a ticket to Sunnydale sitting on his desk. The sorts of demons Lucius had dealt with weren’t the kind legitimate Magical entities took interest in. They were the kind Aurors and Warlocks and Watchers tended to kill on sight. Wolfram & Hart no doubt kept a slew of them either on their payroll, or on a watch list related to their demonic clients.

So Draco should be able to call on the Malfoy infamy in playing off the (only partially) doctored identification documentations Smith had arranged for himself and Hermione.

“And we have to pretend to be married to do that?” Hermione asked. Her tone had more to do with uncertainty and awkwardness, than with that aspect of the plan itself. Draco thought.

“It gives us a reason to be seeking the firm’s services together,” Draco reasoned. And he tried not to take too much relish in adding: “And I suppose we don’t have to be married, to be pursuing the contract negotiations we’re going to be pursuing. But after the potion, I thought you might appreciate it if I made you an honest woman.”

Hermione’s eyes narrowed.

“What potion?” she asked, slowly.

Draco lost his reservations and misgivings, for a moment, in a grin.

“The Fell Brethren want a baby,” he said. “So we’re going to let them think we’re giving them one. Ours.”

 

~+[]+~

 

“Pregnant. You had to get me _pregnant_.”

Draco sighed, crossing his arms as he leaned back against the bathroom door. At least here in LA, Hermione had found them a hotel room, in which there was a bathroom door. Even if Hermione had locked herself on the other side of it about as soon as they’d come in.

They’d been having this conversation since before they’d reached Mazonn’s Magicks.

“ _Pregnant! You want to get me pregnant_?” Hermione had shrieked.

Actually, the _Director_ had wanted Draco to get Hermione pregnant. Albeit not _pregnant_. As Draco had been trying to explain for some time. And Draco doubted the man so much “wanted” this, as considered it a most clever and convenient method of getting them into Wolfram and Hart’s offices.

“You aren’t actually pregnant, Granger. You’ll only appear to be pregnant to anyone who hasn’t charmed themselves to see through the potion’s magics.”

Assuming the potion worked correctly. Draco was confident of his abilities as a potions maker, but he doubted Hermione’s having locked herself in a room before taking this potion had anything to do with her faith in his skills.

Hermione didn’t say anything.

“Granger?”

Draco knew of all the things that could go wrong when introducing a rarely used potion to a new test subject. What was worse - Hermione knew them, too. Which made her having locked herself in a room, alone, all the more frustrating. Not that a simple locked door could keep Draco away, should Hermione develop the need for assistance.

The frustration came in waiting to see if Hermione needed assisting. And not hexing the bathroom door down the second time Hermione ignored Draco’s calling her name.

“I am not going out there like this,” Hermione said, at last, just as Draco was becoming edgy.

Draco released the breath he realized, with some discomfort, he’d been holding.

If Hermione could speak, she hadn’t lost her tongue. And her esophagus hadn’t swelled terribly. There were two concerns Draco could cross off his list.

“Obviously you are. Even if we had enough ingredients to mix a second batch of the faux conceptus, I could hardly play the part of the expectant mother.”

Draco didn’t have to hear Hermione taking a breath in plans of responding to that to know she was about to say something he wouldn’t like, so:

“I did say that we don’t have enough ingredients for a second batch, Hermione. So don’t get any clever ideas.”

“If this is your idea of clever, I should think not,” Hermione said, her voice sounding muffled through the bathroom door.

And then the door opened.

Draco lost the words he’d been about to speak. Hermione was wrapped in the maternity robes Smith had helpfully included with the other items he’d had sent over for them. The robes swallowed most of Hermione’s figure, but couldn’t hide the more-than-noticeable swell of her now seemingly pregnant stomach.

Hermione had lain both hands, gently, on her distended middle. She looked up at Draco with a decidedly un-motherly look in her eyes.

“This has got to be some sick prank, Malfoy. I knew I should have taken that callback myself! Not actually pregnant… Am I not actually pregnant with _twins_ , then? This is ridiculous!”

Draco blinked.

Hermione looked back down at her magically altered body. She turned again to the bathroom mirror she’d most likely been staring into since she’d gulped down Draco’s potion.

“I suppose I would have to be some months along into the pregnancy. We don’t want to make a career out of this, but _honestly_.”

There was obviously nothing wrong with Hermione, or the effects the potion had had on her.

Draco did, however, wonder if there was something wrong with him, as he watched the awkward way Hermione moved; the hesitant way she touched her rounded stomach.

When he looked up at Hermione’s face in the bathroom mirror, he caught sight of himself standing behind her, and quickly looked away again.

He’d missed whatever Hermione had been saying. And, judging by the disapproving glare he was getting, Draco figured Hermione had been saying quite a lot.

Draco caught just the tail end of it.

“-who we are? They might already be expecting us. Do you think I can duel my way out of there like this? I’m as big as a tree trunk.”

“You won’t have to,” Draco said without thinking, although it was no less what he’d already planned. “I’m going to go in tomorrow alone, and see what happens. Tonight we’ll get you something a bit more Muggle to wear, and if all goes well, I’ll schedule a time for the two of us to meet with Wolfram and Hart’s people together.”

And then, partly because he was curious, partly because he’d known Hermione would object to this, he asked: “Besides, we’re going to have to pretend to be Muggles to meet the Fell Brethren’s criterion for potential donors. Don’t Muggle women have to spend a lot of time off their feet while they’re pregnant? Wouldn’t want the mother of our little sacrifice overtaxing herself by trying to keep up with the men.”

Draco knew it was a very good thing that Hermione wasn’t really pregnant. Pregnant witches sometimes lost control of their powers, the way that young wizards and witches do, and Draco doubted he had enough restorative potion left in his potions kit to heal the damage a pregnant Hermione might have done to him at that moment.

 

\---

 

“Excuse me?”

The next day found Draco making an early morning call to confirm his ten o’clock appointment to speak with Wolfram and Hart’s CEO.

Of course, Draco didn’t have a ten o’clock appointment with the CEO before he called to confirm it. Then the receptionist who answered the phone politely informed Draco of this. Seeing as this was an evil receptionist Draco was talking to, “politely” meant that she laughed at him, without laughing, then attempted to send him on his way.

How easy some old skills came back to Draco. Making “little people” rue not showing him the reverence he rightly deserved was one of them. Draco slipped into a Malfoy-voice that would have done his father proud, and informed the receptionist as to just why he didn’t need to have an appointment with her CEO to come in and see him whenever Draco damn well pleased. This involved tossing about a few of the credentials Smith had fabricated for him, and a couple he hadn’t needed to, and sounding alternately pissed-off and dispassionately disdaining.

The next person Draco talked to was the CEO’s personal secretary, and she just wanted to ask if there were any special arrangements that needed to be made before Draco’s arrival.

There were some aspects of being evil that Draco, frankly, rather missed.

Draco arrived at Wolfram and Hart at 9:55. On one hand, he wouldn’t have minded being fashionably late. On the other, if the firm really was onto them - as Hermione had suggested - Draco decided he’d rather not put off finding out.

Draco had dressed in one of the designer suits he’d picked up as he and Hermione had shopped the night before, and had beat down all of his instincts as he’d left his wand, his potions, and every other magical item in his possession in the hotel room with Hermione. Then he’d slipped into the dark coat he’d also purchased the night before, and had headed out to see what the day held in store for him.

So far as Draco could tell, once he was actually in the executive conference room, having announced his intentions when it didn’t seem as though the CEO’s secretary was going to announce them for him, the day had started out like shite.

There were Muggles who’d paid less on their homes than Draco had on the ensemble he was wearing. And still he felt underdressed. He was bloody well meeting with the former _Scourge of Europe_ to discuss the sale of an unborn child. He’d never so much as gone on a study date before, without donning some of Madam Malkin’s finest. He hadn’t gotten to eat breakfast, as the serum he’d taken to protect himself from Legilimancy always made him nauseous. And as soon as Draco walked into the conference room, he realized there were other things he should probably be nauseous about, besides that serum.

The broad-shouldered, dark-haired man at the end of the table had to be Angelus. Or Angel, or whatever they called him now. The vampire Wolfram and Hart had hired as their CEO. Besides the fact that he was sitting at the head of the conference table, he was also one of the youngest-looking executives in the room. Two-hundred and fifty years old and counting, Hermione had said as she and Draco had researched early that morning, and he didn’t look a day over twenty-four.

On Angel’s left sat a dark-skinned man in a suit that just screamed “lawyer”. Next to him sat a thin young woman with long, brown hair, wearing a lab coat. She looked a bit like Luna Lovegood, actually, Draco found himself thinking, and that’s when Draco knew he was getting upset.

Next to the Lovegood knockoff sat a green-skinned demon Draco couldn’t identify, wearing the most garish purple outfit Draco could imagine. And at Angel’s right hand, sat a human who tugged at Draco’s sensitivity towards Dark things a lot more than a human really should have. He was most likely the ex-Watcher then, Draco supposed.

Between the Watcher and Angel, sat a slender man with pale hair that might have matched Draco’s own, if it had been natural. The man wore a black trench coat over black clothing.

Draco knew who he was. He just hadn’t known he would be here.

Draco had read a little something about him, as he and Hermione had searched her texts for more on Angel.

This was _Spike_. The vampire once known as “William the Bloody” - sired by the vampire Drusilla, whom Angelus had, likewise, sired.

As soon as Draco had walked into the room he had sensed him, as he had sensed Angel. The Darkness in them both, combined with the Dark in the ex-Watcher - on top of the Dark that was all around them, in this building - was sending all of Draco’s senses into a state of alarmed paranoia. It took everything in Draco’s willpower not to give in to it - to control the jitters of his nerves even more than usual; to keep his breathing even and his heartbeat from speeding up. His experiences as a Death Eater had taught Draco, long before his training as an Auror, that the invisible signs of nervousness and fear in humans were more than just visible to those beings capable of detecting them.

Draco did not let the smirk he’d carried into the room with him falter.

He smoothly took the seat at the opposite end of the table from Angelus - slow enough that his pace seemed relaxed and not contrived; quick enough that he didn’t appear uncertain of his actions. He leaned back in his seat as if making himself perfectly comfortable, and hid his hands in his pants pockets.

“I’ve a mutual acquaintance of one of your clients,” he said, just as he’d rehearsed. Speaking gave him a focus, and that focus gave Draco back a sense of himself. His cocky front was less of a front than before as he continued, “I hear they’re looking to buy a baby. And that your firm has agreed to broker the deal. As it just so happens, I have exactly what you’re looking for.”

A number of thoughts and faces went through Draco’s head as he awaited Angelus’ response, and he wondered - for not the first time - how in the bloody fucking hell he’d ever figured that being a _good_ guy was going to save him from an ugly fate.


End file.
